Diabetes Conversation Cards

When our student collaborators and designers (Sam Oliver, Nick Reid, and Xiaoying He) went to the Mott diabetes clinic to spend time with patients, they identified some common issues in communicating with patients. As Xiaoying describes:

“When we were trying to work with the patients to identify problems and potentially design solutions for the clinic, we found that it was too time consuming to start from scratch with every patient. And it was also hard to explain what our team was doing in a short amount of time.

We realized that we could create a more intuitive and user-friendly method to approach this participatory design process. The solution came up as a card-sorting game designed for patients to sort out the most troublesome problems for them.”

Thus, the Diabetes Conversation Cards were born!

The stack of cards can be given to patients at the beginning of a visit, and they can pick their top 3 desired topics of conversation. The cards are an effective tool for starting a conversation about barriers to managing diabetes and blank ones can be used to come up with new ideas.

You can download the cards here.

Back to projects