‘Health Cultures - Healthcare and Multiculturalism’ is a 2-year ongoing design research project that looks at the health sector and how it is developing within the context of a growing multicultural society, the decreasing welfare state and the expanding digital culture.

We collected visual data in different health-related contexts in Genk (BE) - sport infrastructure, professional football club, doctor’s residence and practice, hospital, healthcare logistics.
This supported us to question whether caregivers and care receivers from different cultural backgrounds could better collaborate via the exchange of a richer diversity of health data for self-monitoring and to complement the official health records and interactions.

Therefore, we highlighted the ‘interfaces’ - tools, data, codes and interactions - currently in use in these contexts to design possible scenarios for self-monitoring and we imagined how new health interfaces could be designed and integrated into existing collective infrastructures in Genk (cultural centers, associations, public infrastructures, etc.)

To invite other people to think with us on how interfaces could allow for self-collecting and monitoring of health data in relation to existing collective infrastructures, we designed a screen-installation.

The installation uses an algorithm to search for visual similarities between the data we as design researchers collected in the health field (on codes, tools, data, interactions and collective infrastructures) and triggers with questions the participants to imagine collective infrastructures that offer access to novel interfaces for self-monitoring of health (e.g. breast self-screening data collection, sleep patterns, etc.).

Project by Teis De Greve, Daniela Dossi & Irma Földényi