Critical Care Futures
Using design, care and creativity to shape the future of data-driven research in ICU settings.
Project Overview:
Critical Care Futures brought together clinicians, researchers, designers, and ICU survivors to explore what the future of critical care research should look like—especially in a post-COVID, data-intensive healthcare landscape. Through human-centred design methods, including cultural probes, the team co-developed new principles for data ethics, consent, and participation. The project invited new voices into conversations about ICU research, and its outputs are shaping ongoing policy, public dialogue, and future research grants.
Team:
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Lead Researchers: Dr Annemarie Docherty (University of Edinburgh & NHS Lothian), Dr Catherine Montgomery (University of Edinburgh), Dr Corrienne McCulloch (NHS Lothian)
Design Collaborators: Santini Basra, Lizzie Abernethy, Freyja Harris (Andthen)
Co-designers: Jean Antonelli, Dr Monika Beatty, Joanne Mair, Goutam Das (PPI)
Funders: ScotPEN Wellcome Engagement Award (2022–2023)
Goals & Activities
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Empower ICU survivors and families to shape research questions and ethics.
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Use cultural probes to explore ideas around data, consent, and identity.
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Co-create public artefacts to provoke discussion in clinical and policy spaces.
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Train researchers and clinicians in creative public engagement techniques.
Project Outputs
Cultural Probes Toolkit
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Co-designed activities: data islands, consent postcards, ICU guestbooks
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Used by ICU survivors, relatives, clinicians, and ethics committee members
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Adapted for third sector and university engagement workshops
Principles & Provocations
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Six design principles to guide ethical, patient-centred ICU research
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Artefacts created: custom pens, mugs, visual prompts installed in ICU spaces
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Principles covered issues such as consent timing, data transparency, and patient care
Public Engagement & Training
- Workshops at the ESRC Festival of Social Science
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Student training at the University of Edinburgh and CRUK Convergence Centre
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Reflections shared on Critical Care Futures Medium blog
Ongoing Projects
ICU-Heart
ICU-Heart is a multi-disciplinary collaboration that aims to revolutionise the care of Intensive Care patients by harnessing novel approaches in the use of technology and high dimensional data. Our two exemplar projects – diagnosis of myocardial infarction, and multimorbidity – combine key unanswered research priorities with the need for data driven innovation.
- DARE
DARE aims to provide a novel comparative and context-specific framework for understanding how informatics and medicine are re-shaping each other and how data-driven healthcare is changing conceptions of health, illness and personhood. In doing so, we will make a major sociological contribution to understandings of healthcare in the era of digital transformation.
Studio Then
Studio Then are designers that research. In particular, we research the future — what it could look like, and what people want it to look like.
