Witnessed Presence in Merging Realities in Healthcare Environments

Witnessing is core to the design of social interaction. This chapter explores the role of witnessing from different perspectives. The first perspective focuses on witnessing in its social and psychological consequences. Response-ability, address- ability, the performance of testimony and transparency of subject position determine how individuals perceive/ witness each other. The second perspective focuses on the impact of technology on witnessing and introduces the YUTPA framework as a tool for the design and orchestration of witnessing in technology environments. The third, fourth and fifth sections discuss initial results of exploratory research performed in the Netherlands and in India. This research shows that the way in which witnessing is orchestrated affects the psychological wellbeing of the people involved: it can be beneficial or detrimental. These results demonstrate the need to explicitly design witnessing along the four dimensions of the YUTPA model: space, time, action and relation. The sixth section addresses a third perspective, the technological perspective that focuses on the design of large scale socio-technological systems. The conclusion of this chapter argues that health systems that affect the psychological well being of the people involved must both be designed to take witnessing into account but also to be used appropriately.