Robert Djaelani

Robert Djaelani

For 11 years, Robert Djaelani has been promoting service design practices in public services and NGOs. Robert helps deliver usable services in different sectors as a designer and anthropologist. Robert has helped improve addiction services in Indonesia, through managing a charity. He has also improved public services in Scotland by working with local councils and other providers. His research focuses on the role of design in developing human-centred systems in public services. Through this research into Service Design in health services, Robert began working in the NHS in 2018. He has been working on delivering NHS services as a Senior Service Designer. He is currently coordinating research and design practices on many citizen services.






Thesis Title: The value of axiological practices: Addressing the issues of implementing and sustaining participatory design within the UK’s health and social care systemn

The author presents findings from practice-based design research conducted in the UK’s health and social care system. In this system, human-centred practices are becoming increasingly common. Approaches such as Service Design and Participatory Design offer an opportunity to transform health services but there are challenges to implementing these approaches. However, the right conditions, stakeholder alignment, sustainability and scale are all issues that limit the impact of designers in this context. This research explores the challenges of implementing participatory design practices in the context of the UK’s health and social care system. This thesis shows that axiological practices help identify if the conditions for participatory design exist within an organisation. Axiological practices also increased the autonomy of participants by helping them to understand the many different actors and artefacts in the systems they inhabit. This research provides an ethnography of participatory design practice in a charity in the North East of England. Grounded theory was chosen as a participatory approach to generate theory in the first phase of the research. This approach informed the design practice in the charity and presented participants with insights. In the second phase of the research, the grounded theory from the ethnography was critically evaluated using three other case studies conducted in the North East of England’s health and social care system. The theory and the critical evaluation of the theory provide new insight into the challenges of implementing participatory design practices. The benefit of adopting an axiological approach is that participants are able to understand and adapt the participatory design processes they are part of. This increasing autonomy in participatory design practice is associated with moving up the ladder of participation. These findings are of value to designers interested in applying axiological approaches in the UK’s health and social care system.


Principal Supervisor: Matt Lievesley

Second Supervisor: Gilbert Cocktonn