A case study of motivating care workers for cooperation with a long-term co-creation project
Authors: Ihara Masayuki , Murakami Hiroki , Tokunaga Hiroko , Saruwatari Shinpei , Takeshita Kazuki , Koga Akihiko , Yukihira Takashi , Hisano Shinya 
Published: July 2022

Human-computer interaction technologies play an important role in configuring a service to be delivered to end users. For a sustainable service, not only user-centered but also service-provider-centered design is important since an acceptance of the service provider is also essential to maintain a reasonable operation for the service. A co-creation project with busy employees of the service provider company has a difficulty in building a rapport due to their psychological burden to join it. In particular, health care companies suffer from labor shortage that causes a large burden on one worker at care site. It is not easy to intervene in such a busy work site to offer the opportunity of co-creation project.This paper introduces a case study of motivating busy care workers for building a rapport toward a cooperative co-creation project. A workshop was conducted to make them feel the successful experience at the beginning of the long-time project to improve their daily tasks or to create a novel health care service. The workshop was expected to provide them with a small successful experience under the following tough constraints. The workshop participants are all workers at the nursing facility and consideration for preventing their turnover is required. They do not have any extra space in their mind due to the busyness of daily tasks then every workshop must be finished only in 30 minutes.The workshop was held as a 3-time event to design a leaflet to introduce their nursing facility. The first objective of the workshop is that workshop participants contemplate their daily tasks, recognize the attractiveness of a care worker’s job, and feel proud of their own job. The second is that the participants discover the problems of their daily tasks and are aware of improvement of their operations by recognizing their facility. These objectives were set with a viewpoint of employee education towards the project cooperation. We evaluated the effectiveness of the workshop by a sense of accomplishment for the leaflet prototyping work and by three types of motivation; awareness of understanding and improving daily tasks, pride of job, and willingness to work.Questionnaire survey results revealed that the workshop was effective in making them aware of understanding and improving their daily tasks and in increasing their pride and willingness to work towards fostering awareness of cooperation for the project. The correlation and regression analyses for the results showed that pride of job leads to willingness to work and that the pride and willingness to work lead to the motivation to understand and improve their work.The contributions of this work are introduction of a case study under tough constraints and confirmation of the workshop effectiveness. Though most participatory design workshops are conducted by selected participants with relatively higher motivation outside their main job, our study was conducted under the tough and real constraints at the nursing facility. A current stage of our work is a hypothesis search for building a better service-provider-centered design methodology. Future work will be more practices of co-creation design processes.