Health care both in public and private spheres is under increasing pressure to innovate. Ageing populations, increasing demands, rising costs and outdated infrastructure are just a few of the many challenges the sector is facing today. Understanding service as value co-creation taking place in interaction (Edvardsson, Gustafsson, & Roos, 2005; Vargo & Lusch, 2004) emphasizes that resources are located within and outside the health care system. Seeing service innovation as novel ways of integrating resources (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015Koskela-Huotari et al, 2016; Rusanen et al, 2014) means that there is a pressing need to involve the knowledge, experiences and skills of employees, patients and relatives in the service development process. Recent advancements in service research emphasize the need to recognize the patient as a co-creator of the care processes, not as a passive receiver. New approaches for understanding the patients within the health care sector are necessary to create solutions that reduce costs while achieving efficiency, engagement and better overall value in delivery. Design thinking and practice, and more specifically service design, are increasingly applied to and used for improvement and innovation in health care settings (Bate & Robert, 2008; Freire & Sangiorgi, 2010). Design methods with participatory, empathic and experiential characteristics are repeatedly employed. Design thinking as concept has been critiqued for a superficial use of design methods without taking design practice experience and aesthetic competence into account (Tonkinwise, 2011). Stephens and Boland (2014)bring specific attention to aesthetic knowledge being core to design thinking and how it challenges what is known in organizations. Aesthetic knowledge is based on learning through our bodily senses and is embedded in design practice and methods. Drawing on a pragmatist position on experience and inquiry, Stephens and Boland argue that aesthetic knowledge is specifically useful for defining and solving problems. Service design methods, based in design knowledge, make explicit use of aesthetic and experiential knowledge for understanding how value co-creation takes place and what is important in the value co-creation situation (Wetter-Edman, 2014). This includes both drawing on the participant’s prior experiences as well as staging situations where lived experiences may be formed. The Swedish national center for patient-focused service innovation, Experio Lab, integrates design within health care for service innovation purposes. The center is a learning project and a part of County Council of Värmland. Experio Lab has the dual goal of developing valuable services from the patient’s perspective and equipping health care personnel with tools to continually involve patients (Experiolab.se). This paper presents three cases from Experio Lab that take different approaches to creating and engaging lived experiences for forming the bases of service innovation:1) The Patient Journey: the purpose of this project was to understand what happens in the care co-ordination process, from the patient’s perspective, when different systems, competences and people interact throughout the patient’s experience. The patient’s journey was investigated before, during and after a specific case of illness. The project involved a combination of several different methods: becoming a user, role-play, participant observation, journey mapping and expert interviews.2) The Test-tube Journey: the purpose of this project was to decrease the error-rate when tests of blood and tissues are taken. In this project, the journey of a test-tube through the system was followed with specific attention paid to the situations where different test are taken. 3) Chronically Devoted: the purpose of this project was to create good examples of how the care of terminally ill can involve higher levels of co-creation for radically improved care. Patients were deeply involved throughout both the exploration and ideation phases of the project. The Experio Way includes three commitments: 1) curiosity and empathy for people’s everyday lives, 2) courage to dream of a better future and 3) co-creation to make it happen. The above project examples show how a foundation can be built within organizations to integrate lived experience and aesthetic knowledge into the service innovation process. These cases demonstrate how the integration of experiential and aesthetic knowledge contributes to patient-centered care within the healthcare system and challenges actors’ existing routines.
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