Claremont, California USA and Boston, Massachusetts USA
Hope, Embodied. A Year-long User Experience Design Project with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
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“A prototype is a question, embodied”- Diego Rodriguez IDEO
Our work continued into Spring 2022.
In the fall, we’d gotten to see and understand the broader landscape of the volunteer program at Dana-Farber. In the spring, we dove deep into one particular area of the volunteer program at Dana-Farber: the One-to-One program and developed three domains of solutions through this process.
The One-to-One program is a patient support program at Dana-Farber where a current patient gets matched up with a volunteer who used to be a patient or a caregiver, and they have a series of phone calls where the volunteer can provide support or offer advice to the patient, from the perspective of someone who’s been there. The program’s slogan, “Connecting with someone who’s been there” is more literal than you might think - the One-to-One program aims to match patients with volunteers who had as close as possible to their same diagnosis and treatment.
Through conversation and synthesis, we developed three key insights:
Due to the specialized care that One-to-One’s mission was founded upon, some mentors will go months without getting matched with a patient
One-to-One volunteers are feeling underutilized
One-to-One volunteers seek personal fulfillment in giving support to patients and when unable to, they need another outlet
Hope, Embodied
Project Client: the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston MA
Project Partners: Olivia Hewitt Pitzer College 2022, Patient and Family Resource Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Dana-Farber Volunteer Community, Professors and Staff of the Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Innovation at the Claremont Colleges
Fall 2021/Spring 2022
Our design work with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was captivating, emotionally strenuous and incredibly gratifying.
The initial design challenge that the Dana-Farber team pitched to us was, how might we better help patients access resources as they navigate information overload?
Often times, when patients are diagnosed with cancer, they enter a state of information overload. There are so many resources being thrown at them, but they just received what is many times a life-altering and traumatic diagnosis, and are unable to process anything else.
Dana-Farber makes an incredible number of resources available to patients, but many of the resources are not as utilized as they would like. It’s extremely challenging to know when the right time to connect patients with resources is. How might we find a time to connect patients with resources when they are in a place to really hear about them and take advantage of them? Dana-Farber turned to us to explore this challenge further.
Through interviews with volunteers, people associated to the cancer journey and members of Dana-Farber administration and staff, we began to synthesize what we’d heard, looked for patterns, surprises, or themes that kept bubbling to the surface. Below are some of the key insights we found.
Volunteers are hope, embodied.
Volunteers at Dana-Farber are incredibly influential in helping patients hear about resources. Therefore, the best thing we can do to help patients access resources is to elevate the work of the volunteers, and help make their expertise and care even more accessible to patients.
Volunteers are all in. They’re willing to invest themselves and their heart in emotionally challenging situations if it means they can help someone whose story overlaps with theirs.
It’s meaningful to connect with others who share your story. It’s like having a shared secret language that nobody else understands.
Volunteers are driven to do what they do to first and foremost help a patient but to also get in touch with fellow volunteers, share stories and work together to tell a collective story.
This was #1 of the three domains we explored to address the larger need of engaging One- to-One mentors in between phone calls with patients.
How might we expand the matching process within the One-to-One program?
With our question regarding the matching process, we explored the potential of expanding the criteria used to match patients with mentors. This would theoretically create a higher frequency of matches per mentor. We also saw potential to aid the programs bandwidth needs by creating a way for the mentors themselves to assist the task of matching. Since they were cancer patients themselves, they have specialized insight into what a patient may need from a mentorship.
Initially, we began to answer this question by assessing the One-to-One referral form as it currently stands. We engaged with this form using Visual Thinking Strategy facilitation and charrettes with fellow HCD students and professors. Based on this work, we asked:
How could offering a menu of options regarding what the patient or caregiver needs better equip them to identify what they want out of the relationship?
How might the questions posed on the referral form offer new forms of introspection in order to expand the criteria that is used to match patients and mentors?
To engage these questions, we designed our first go at a re-imagined referral form. Images to the right.
Testing and Results
Another result from this domain was the insight that volunteers hold viable potential for alleviating the program’s current bandwidth needs. We suggested that there be a training for mentors to join the program’s Advisory Committee. While serving on the Advisory Committee, mentors could be given the option to go through an approval process so that they may assist with matches if given allowance to. In providing opportunities such as this, there could be different branches of the One-to-One program created to maintain engagement of mentors, while also maintaining the integrity of specialized matching- a core pillar of the One-to-One program. In this solution, multiple needs are addressed.
That brings us to #2 of the three domains we explored to address the larger need of engaging One-to-One mentors in between phone calls with patients.
How might we offer One-to-One mentors structured forms of introspection and engagement?
This idea targeted our larger need most directly in that it literally provides an activity for One-to-One mentors to engage in separate from their calls with patients. This workshop intends to help mentors better understand their story and in the long run, how their unique experience can be best translated into care for patients. They do this by engaging more deeply with their own as well as other mentors stories. As we heard from one of our interviewees, there is power in being able to recognize a strength within another person, voice it to them and have them reflect the same back to you.
Through our work, the largest and most heart-warming thing that we learned was how united Dana-Farber’s volunteer group, primarily those involved in One-to-One, are in their mission to create the best experience for a patient possible. We thought that a great way to bolster this strength is to bring One-to-One mentors closer to one another and in that, the story that they are collectively telling.
To reiterate the important distinction made to us between the initiative of social workers and that of Dana-Farber’s Patient and Family Resource Center, this workshop is meant to fall outside the domain of therapy for mentors. The session hopes to get at similar points of the recipient’s experience but offers a different domain of exploration.
This prototype was #3 of three domains we explored to address the larger need of engaging One-to-One mentors in between phone calls with patients.
While not a novel idea of our Spring 2022 work, we revisited Faces of Dana-Farber from our final deliverable of Fall 2021. This media project is a tangible way to bring not only One-to-One mentors, but all volunteers stories to life in a visible way on both the physical and digital walls of the Institute.
This media project is meant to communicate the themes that we identified amongst Dana-Farber volunteers-Hopeful, Connected and Empowered.
We began to explore graphic designs that portrayed these three sentiments.
Present intentions for the meeting (as discussed and outlined previously by the Advisory Committee)
Questions to explore (spoken or written format)
- How does being a Dana-Farber volunteer and more specifically, a One-to-One mentor, coincide with other aspects of your journey, the story that you are constantly unfolding?
- What has been an unexpected element of your experience at Dana-Farber?
- What is one sentence that best communicates how Dana-Farber volunteer-ship has influenced your external life and well-being?
Collect materials
Close
The products of a Narrative Workshop:
- Summary of responses/synthesis of findings
Where they go:
- Into a One-to-One database- the database is referenced in conversations and projects surrounding Dana-Farber volunteer brand building and forms of generating a communal narrative
- To be used in matching process
- To be used in Faces of Dana-Farber
Domain II: Mentor Introspection and Engagement
Domain III: Volunteer Media Campaign
Domain I: Expanding the Matching Process
Amplifying the work of a volunteer community who bring their stories, resonance and connection to the experience of cancer patients.
The iceberg metaphor allowed us to recognize what we knew to be true and then question what lies beneath the surface for why volunteers wish to be One-to-One mentors. To address the need of mentor engagement within the program, we needed to better understand their motivations in the role.
The impact:
“I wasn’t expecting this to happen, but your work has given me a new perspective on why I volunteer and what it really means to me. I can see your material benefitting volunteer training and recruitment for years to come” -Volunteer of 25 years
Prototype #1: A Re-Imagined One-to-One Referral Form
Prototype #3: Faces of Dana-Farber
Prototype #2: A Narrative Workshop
These posters are shown on monitors around the Institute's facilities and offered to patients in a digital booklet.
“Even from across the country, you were able to pick up on such nuance and tap into a pivotal part of our ecosystem at Dana-Farber. We couldn’t be more grateful. Thank you for your work.” - Dana-Farber Administrator
