Indigenous Design: healthcare professional using self-produced video in articulating and developing work practices

The article discusses a design project at an intensive care unit with the intent to support informal learning that ended in a solution where the staffs produce short movies on work practice procedures that are made available on handheld computers. The making and reviewing of the videos proved to be a valuable tool in indigenously designing new work procedures. The article begins with looking at how the staffs design local routines. We argue that local rather than top- down standardizations are more useful, since they are tailored to the local needs and given meaning through participation. We then take a closer look at three examples of self-produced videos and what kind of collaborative discussions about work procedures they facilitated. With the help of the concept of “framing” the concept of “reification/participation” and “conscription device” we will discuss why the self- produced videos worked well to facilitate continuous learning and could provide “softer” more local and ephemeral standards from the bottom up perspective. We conclude that the staff have adopted a complementary reflective practice building on their tradition of indigenously designing their practice, but now equipped with a visual representation that are akin to engineers and designers way of using drawings as conscription devices.