Transitions in Healthcare:
Designing Adaptive and
Inclusive Care Futures

Co-developing adaptive, resilient and person-centred approaches to care across critical transition points:  between settings, care levels and life stages

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Question

How can design-led approaches transform understandings of healthcare transitions?

Question

What service interventions can support measurable improvements in care experiences?

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How do we develop new frameworks for stakeholder engagement in healthcare transformation?

Doctoral Researchers

Chelsea Canavan is a multidisciplinary artist and socially engaged art and design practitioner exploring care, control, visibility, and belonging through participatory, design-led methodologies. Working across healthcare, education, and community contexts, they create collaborative spaces centred on voice, relational care, and co-creation, where conversation, collective making, and shared experience become the work itself.

Design-Led Approaches to Child and Youth Transitions — Looking at the intersections of Care and Control
This research explores how children and young people experience visibility, agency, and belonging during significant life transitions, examining these spaces through the intertwined lenses of care and control. Across healthcare, education, family, community, and digital systems, structures intended to support can also regulate or constrain, making care and control difficult to separate. Using participatory and design-led methodologies, the project investigates how transition systems are experienced, negotiated, and potentially reframed. Rather than producing predetermined solutions, the research develops collaborative and adaptive forms of inquiry grounded in listening, reflection, and co-creation. Drawing on over a decade of participatory practice across healthcare, education, and community contexts, my work moves beyond surface symptoms toward structural reframing, using creative practice as a method for making complexity visible, testing assumptions, and collaboratively navigating sustainable transition support.

Chelsea Canavan
Luisina is a designer and researcher from Argentina with a background in Visual Communication, social innovation, and a Master’s in Eco-Social Design. Her work focuses on participatory and care-oriented approaches, particularly with vulnerable and often invisible communities, exploring how social structures and lived experience shape inclusion, belonging, and participation across different contexts.

Ageing in Ireland: Design-Led Approaches to Social Imaginaries, Care and Later Life Transitions
This PhD explores how social imaginaries of ageing shape older adults’ experiences of visibility, agency, and belonging during later life transitions, particularly retirement, in Ireland. While dominant narratives often frame ageing through independence or decline, these imaginaries influence how ageing is perceived, experienced, and socially valued.
Adopting a participatory, design-led approach, the research engages older adults and stakeholders in Ireland to explore how these imaginaries are internalised, negotiated, or resisted in everyday life. Through co-creative processes, it investigates how design can support the emergence of alternative narratives and more relational forms of care.
Ultimately, the project aims to contribute to more inclusive and meaningful later life experiences in Ireland by connecting lived experience, diverse forms of knowledge, and design practice.

Luisina Figueroa Garro

Research Supervisors/Project Co-Leads

Emma Creighton is a design researcher and lecturer at NCAD, leading DesignLabs: Health. Working with clinical, academic, and community partners, she investigates how design can be embedded within health and social care systems to support service improvement, strengthen organisational capability, and improve experiences and outcomes of care.

Emma Creighton NCAD
Dr Kyle Boyd is a Lecturer in Digital Design at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. His work explores how digital technologies can be designed, evaluated and applied to support people, services and communities. He has published across areas including usability, interface design, digital health, user experience evaluation and the measurement of user experience.

Kyle is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, recognising his sustained contribution to learning, teaching and academic practice in higher education.

Kyle Boyd UU
Louise is an Associate Professor, course director for The MSc in Design for Health and Wellbeing and lecturer on the BSc. Product Design & Technology UL. Louise is the founding member of the Product Design and the Performing Arts (PDPA) research group.

Louise Kiernan UL
Dr. Muireann McMahon is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Product Design at University of Limerick. Her research and teaching focus on Sustainable Design, Design for Social Impact and Design for Wellbeing. She explores, through collaborative studios, projects and publications how creative processes support meaningful change for people and the planet.

Muireann McMahon UL

Partners

Age & Opportunity is the national organisation creating opportunities that empower older people to enhance individual and community wellbeing through participation in physical activity and recreational sport, arts and creativity, personal development and active citizenship initiatives. We envision an Ireland where older age is recognised as a time of opportunity and where all older people can be active, visible, creative, connected and confident about ageing.

ageandopportunity.ie
Age Friendly Ireland is a local government shared service that functions as a national office for the delivery of Age Friendly activity across Ireland, under the banner of the WHO Global Network for Age Friendly Cities and Communities. Around the country, local Age Friendly Programmes in each local authority area are developing accessible towns and buildings, Age Friendly Homes, social participation opportunities for older people and actions to improve older people’s quality of life. Older People’s Councils are established in all counties and cities to reflect the diverse voices of older people in the community and ensure that local and national services and policies respond to the needs of the ageing population.

agefriendlyireland.ie
Big Motive is a digital strategy and design consultancy. We combine human-centred design with AI to create measurable impact and bring tomorrow into focus.

www.bigmotive.com
EMEEN is a national network of ethnic minority professionals. It is deeply a committed organisation to NI economy promoting employment and entrepreneurship among ethnic minority professionals and entrepreneurs.

www.emeen.co.uk
HIRANI is the NI Health and Life sciences cluster organisation. Clusters bring together vital stakeholders required to catalyse innovation across a region. We engage across borders and across the sector to develop funding, influence, policy and opportunity for collaboration. We represent Northern Ireland stakeholders and innovators on the global stage.

hira-ni.com
HSE Spark equips frontline staff with the tools and methods of design, to give shape to their insights, develop their ideas collaboratively, and bring them to life through prototyping, testing, and iteration. With human-centred design skills, targeted resources, and a community of like-minded innovators, they can change the healthcare system for the better.

www.hse.ie/spark
Limerick City Partnership is the local development company for Limerick City, working collaboratively to strengthen and empower communities and individuals. We promote social inclusion by supporting participation in civic, economic and social life. We work in partnership with stakeholders and are a registered charity and company limited by guarantee.

limerickcitypartnership.ie
The National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) is the representative body for voluntary youth organisations in Ireland. Our member organisations work with, and for, up to 380,000 young people in every community in Ireland, with the support of 40,000 volunteers and 1,400 paid staff. NYCI functions to represent the interests of young people and youth organisations and our role as the National Representative Youth Work Organisation is recognised in legislation (Youth Work Act, 2001). The work of NYCI is based on principles of equality, social justice and equal participation for all.

www.youth.ie
Réalta is the national resource organisation dedicated to developing arts + health in Ireland. Réalta seeks to increase understanding and support for arts and health, and to embed the arts into healthcare provision in Ireland through training programmes; providing information, mentoring and advice; supporting networking and engaging with the HSE and other policy makers. Réalta manages the Waterford Healing Arts programmes at University Hospital Waterford and other healthcare settings, and the national resource website artsandhealth.ie. Réalta is core funded by the Arts Council and the HSE.

www.realta.ie
Spunout is Ireland’s youth information and support platform, working towards an Ireland where all young people are supported and empowered to thrive. Spunout has a range of free, accessible and non-judgemental services that are there for you whenever you need them. If it matters to you, it matters to us.

spunout.ie

Transitions in Healthcare: Designing Adaptive and Inclusive Care Futures

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Partners

Transitions in Healthcare:
Designing Adaptive and
Inclusive Care Futures