Metaphors in co-designing a digital healthcare platform: the case of the Brain House for the Health Village

This empirical and method study explored the co-design processes of online public health care services for a national digital platform in Finland. The aim of the research was to understand how multi-stakeholders co-designed content for online services of a digital platform, and how metaphors impacted collaborative sensemaking processes and action. Our research design applied qualitative interviews, observations, and two workshops with Collaborative Story Craft method to explore the narratives and the sensemaking processes of multi-stakeholders involved in the co-design of the Brain House for the Health Village. The Brain House represents the specialization of neurology and is one of 32 houses for the Health Village, which is nationally accessible and coordinated by the five main university hospitals. Through the interviews and the workshops, we argue that the metaphor of the “Brain House” of the “Health Village” revealed a metaphoric field that facilitated collective sensemaking and leveraged collaboration among multi-stakeholders and researchers themselves.