Design for Values in Healthcare Technology

Communities struggle with finding ways for collaboratively exploring the value of healthcare technologies. Currently, a strong emphasis is being placed on the assessment of the costs associated with the health gains (expressed in quality-adjusted life years) that are achieved with these technologies. Following Hannah Arendt, we shall try to argue that such instrumental rationality is misplaced in discovering how technology can help to express human values. It typically reflects a society where processes of design and development, evaluation, and decision making involve separate trajectories and operate distinct from the realm of the lives of humans. We will present an alternative which is deliberative and transformative in nature. Its strengths and limitations will be explored, using the cochlear implant for deaf children as an example.