Design Science Research in Public Health: register your interest

The course

Research the artefacts you already design

Public health and health systems increasingly depend on designed artefacts: health information systems, dashboards, clinical decision support, mobile health applications and the data models behind them. Health professionals design constantly, yet are trained to research almost none of it.

Design science research, which comes from the information systems discipline, treats the artefact itself as a contribution to knowledge. It adds a second output: design principles that explain why an artefact works in its context, which others can reuse. The course teaches the paradigm end to end, through your own problem, and ends with a defended research protocol you can take into a formal study.

Purpose-built design science teaching for a health audience is close to absent internationally, which makes this an early, health-specific curriculum of its kind.

Objectives

What you will be able to do

The course aims to equip you to conceptualise, design, evaluate and communicate rigorous design science research that produces useful artefacts for real problems in health systems and services, and to justify that research to academic and practitioner audiences. On completion you will be able to:

Distinguish design science from empirical research and from adjacent traditions in health, such as quality improvement, implementation science, design-based research, action research and design thinking, and justify when a health problem warrants a design science approach.
Analyse a practice problem from your own setting and conceptualise it as a design problem, with its stakeholders, context and knowledge questions.
Synthesise the objectives and requirements of a solution, and select and justify the artefact type and the theoretical kernel it draws on.
Design and develop an artefact through iterative build cycles with stakeholder participation, ethically and with a documented trail of design decisions.
Design and conduct an evaluation episode that integrates the evaluation instruments of public health with the evaluation architecture of design science.
Position the contribution of a project as artefact, design knowledge or nascent design theory, and appraise a published design science study in health.
Communicate a design science project to academic and practitioner audiences, with the transparency the field now expects.
Integrate artificial intelligence into a project as an instrument of the researcher, a component of the artefact and an object of evaluation, and declare that use.
Produce a design science research protocol for a problem in your own setting, and defend it in peer review.

Format

Seven weeks in three phases

Teaching is built around active studio work. Each concept is modelled once on a shared health case, worked by small groups, then applied to your own case, and each day closes with a critique. Every activity is designed to work on a single device.

Weeks 1 and 2

Preparation

Short, visual and social. You learn to see the made world through Simon and Norman, sketch and pitch ideas, and draft a position statement with a Socratic AI companion, before any method is taught.

Week 3

The teaching block

Five days online on Microsoft Teams, six one-hour sessions a day from 09:00 to 16:00 SAST. Groups carry a health case through the six activities of the method, and present to a simulated review panel on the last day.

Weeks 4 to 7

The assessment window

You write your protocol section by section, with a marked weekly post, evening clinics and a peer-review exchange, and defend it in peer review at the end of Week 7.

Assessment

25% Group deliverable chain and presentation

15% Participation and reflective portfolio

60% Individual research protocol

Register your interest

Tell us you would like to take part

Registration is not yet open. Registering your interest does not commit you to anything; it means you will hear when dates, fees and admission details are confirmed. Fields marked * are required.

Full name * Email address *

Current role or position * Organisation or institution *

Country * Mobile number (optional)

Field of study or professional discipline * Years of relevant professional, research or programme experience *

Highest qualification * Current postgraduate registration *

Which reading interests you? * NQF level 9 (master's level) NQF level 10 reading (doctoral candidates) Not sure yet

Why are you interested in this course? * A problem or project in your own setting that you would work on * The course is built around each delegate's own problem. A few sentences is enough: the problem, where it occurs, who it affects, and the kind of artefact you imagine, such as a dashboard, a decision support tool or a data model.

How would your participation be funded? (optional) How did you hear about the course? (optional)

I agree that the information above may be stored as described in the privacy notice below and used to contact me about this course. *

Contact

Questions and requests

Use this form for questions about the course, or to ask to see, correct or delete information you have given us. Messages go only to the course convenor, Dr Robin Dyers, who will reply by email.

Privacy notice

Who collects it: the course convenor, Dr Robin Dyers, Division of Health Systems and Public Health, Department of Global Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University.

Why: to contact you about this short course, to answer your messages, and to understand who the course is reaching. Your information is not used for anything else, not shared with third parties and not used for marketing.

Where it is kept: in a private store on Vercel, a hosting provider, in its Cape Town region. The store is not publicly accessible, and only the convenor can read it.

Human check: the forms use Cloudflare Turnstile to keep out automated submissions. It checks signals from your browser to confirm a person is sending the form; it does not set advertising cookies, and Cloudflare does not receive the answers you type.

How long: until registration for the first intake closes, or sooner if you ask; after that it is deleted.

Your rights: under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 you may ask to see, correct or delete your information, or withdraw your consent, at any time. Use the contact form above, choosing the matching subject.