Identifying Stakeholders and Interactions in the Dementia Café in Seongju through Empathic Service Design Approaches

Abstract

(1) Background: As we enter the experience economy, industrial design has focused on social innovation and has flowed into social design. This fresh design perspective has been employed in citizen-centered-policymaking through empathic approaches that emphasize the necessity of public service design. Focusing on the results of a 2017 citizen design project, this study aims to identify the effectiveness of an empathic approach in improving public services through investigating stakeholders and their interactions of the Dementia Café in Seongju. (2) Methods: Our team conducted observations and interviews with 20 stakeholders to understand the operational environment of the café. Utilizing the information we gathered, we visualized data in a stakeholder map and carried out critical characteristics analysis (CC) to provide practitioners and researchers addressing the project with quick, intuitive understanding. (3) Results: Three themes were drawn from the observations and interviews conducted in the study: the sustainability of operation, locational and perceptional conditions, and management of clientele. The stakeholder map reveals broken interactions between the café’s staff and its associated hospital, and a loss of opportunities to offer customized administrational dementia care through the café. In the CC analysis, service providers’ patterns were vague while service receivers showed three discernable patterns indicating individualized responses to each group that might be effective. (4) Conclusions: The outcomes including difference of perspectives between the stakeholders confirm that adopting empathic approach enables various stakeholders to offer views and share ideas. Hence this approach possibly helps deliver tailored public services in a creative manner by opening and sharing government-ownership with the public. Since the research was accomplished primarily by qualitative approaches, there may still be limits caused by not including benefits of quantitative approaches in such a large-scaled survey, and these are subject to further research.