The future of health debates? A design thinking sketch of the VR Health Arena

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This article presents a design thinking sketch resulting from a study about German health politics. Simply put, design thinking provides researchers with a means to develop creative responses to social challenges, while also offering a structure to systematize those ideas. For this article, the lack of adapting health political and ethical issues to the media consumption patterns of the population was identified as a core problem of health politics. As an answer to this challenge, the Virtual Reality (VR) Health Arena was developed. It describes a vision of an open and virtual space of discourse in which health political and ethical value debates can take place in a competitive setting and with an educational objective. Thus, the population could receive alternative access to health political, and ethical issues. Existing opportunities provided by recent technological research could make this format become a positive vision of the future. The discussion section of the article, on the one hand, reflects on the way this technology encourages societal discourse. On the other hand, it discusses the possible necessity of evaluating this kind of research by alternative quality criteria.

Original languageEnglish
JournalHealth and Technology
Volume8
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)281-290
Number of pages10
ISSN2190-7188
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.09.2018