Design ideas for inpatient stroke rehabilitation facilities: living lab findings

Objectives: To provide actionable, co-designed ideas for how to optimize the built environment and service of inpatient stroke rehabilitation facilities. Background: Input from diverse stakeholders is needed to ensure that stroke rehabilitation spaces address the unique learning and practice needs of users. In this paper, we report the first phase of the Neuroscience Optimized Virtual Environments Living Lab (NOVELL) Redesign project. Method: We engaged with key stakeholders across: (1) Four co-design workshops (n ranged between 23 and 31 people per workshop including stroke survivors, clinicians, and designers) to generate ideas for design innovation; (2) a workshop with a healthcare architecture firm responding to these ideas; and (3) an online prioritization task to rank outcomes from previous workshops. Results: Outputs included: (1) A framework of objectives describing what is important in stroke rehabilitation environments and services; (2) 28 actionable design ideas for achieving these objectives; (3) 10 scenarios that integrate these design ideas and objectives to describe a speculative, visionary stroke rehabilitation facility; and (4) prioritization of these scenarios. Key scenarios included: Bedrooms that achieve the benefits of both a single and shared room; environments/services that allow stroke survivors access to appropriate levels of risk; and therapy spaces that provide supported challenge and real-world practice. Conclusions: We identified opportunities for innovation that bring service design and architectural design together symbiotically. The interdisciplinary methods—combining co-design, Design Thinking, Speculative Futures, and Multi-Attribute Evaluation within a Living Lab framework—were successful in generating collaborative, actionable, and visionary design ideas.