COVID Smart Screening — Natalia Gulbransen-Diaz

NATALIA GULBRANSEN-DIAZ

The future demands hope and imagination. I’m passionate about deploying critical, design-led approaches to address complex social challenges, with particular focus on investigating how we can design with/and/for communities envisioning positive futures.

Through practice-led inquiry and real-world collaborations with Australian NPOs, I work to understand the conditions and relationships that enable design to be generative rather than extractive, bridging theory and application to create responsive, situated engagements that contribute to ongoing conversations about design's role in community and public life.

My recently completed PhD, Design with/and/for Value, explored how design can support non-profit organisations in realising their collective ambitions beyond economic measures.

Email
CV
Publications [Google Scholar]

Research

Design with/and/for Value
Waste to Resilience: Sanitation against Stunting and Climate Vulnerability in Indonesian Informal Coastal Areas [Coming Soon]
Computational Creativity in the Classroom: Student-Led Co-Design of Generative AI Pedagogies in Design [Coming Soon]
Sonic Street Technologies: Australia
Broadening Horizons: Using Curiosity to Diversify Behaviour
Usability Issues in Self-Service Technologies
COVID-19 Smart IoT Screening System (Pilot) at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network
Introspect

COVID-19 Smart IoT Screening System (Pilot)

Index

Research Assistant, 2020–2021
The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning and Faculty of Medicine and Health, Sydney Children's Hospitals Network

[design evaluation] [design for health and medicine]

Recognition:
Meet the Best Health Project Award finalists in the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards

Iot Awards 2021 - Health

Publications:
Gulbransen-Diaz, N., Yoo, S., & Wang, A. P. (2023). Nurse, give me the news! understanding support for and opposition to a covid-19 health screening system. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(2), 1164.

Yoo, S., Gulbransen-Diaz, N., Parker, C., & Wang, A. P. (2023). Designing digital covid-19 screening: Insights and deliberations. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(5), 3899.

The COVID-19 eGate was an Australian-first integrated health screening system, trialled at The Children's Hospital at Westmead during the pandemic. Combining contact tracing, temperature screening, and evidence-based COVID-19 questions into a single self-service touchpoint, it was a genuinely novel response to an urgent problem — a multidisciplinary collaboration involving more than 20 researchers and clinicians across the University of Sydney and Sydney Children's Hospitals Network. My role was to find out whether it actually worked for the people using it.

UNDERSTANDING WHAT PEOPLE REALLY THOUGHT

My role focused on design research and evaluation of the eGate system, working alongside Dr. Soojeong Yoo (Lead Design Investigator) to understand how hospital staff and visitors experienced the self-service health screening technology.

Over nine months, we designed and ran a mixed-methods evaluation of the eGate — the part of the project concerned not with whether the technology functioned, but with whether it landed well with the people it was built for. Working alongside Dr. Soojeong Yoo, we embedded a System Usability Scale evaluation directly into the eGate workflow and collected qualitative feedback from 220 hospital staff and visitors.

The more interesting challenge was making sense of it. The quantitative data told us that people responded differently to the system; the qualitative data told us why. Through thematic analysis I identified four themes shaping how users experienced the technology: interaction as dialogue, enhancing user skill set, implementation of novel technology, and ideological consternation. That last theme was the most revealing — some users weren't just finding the system difficult, they were questioning its very premise. Their concerns weren't primarily about usability. They were about trust, institutional communication, and whether they felt valued within the hospital system.

Translating that into something useful for the research team — findings that were specific enough to act on, not just interesting to observe — was the part of this project I found most demanding and most rewarding. The work was published across two papers in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, each tackling a different audience: one focused on user acceptance and what drives support or opposition, the other on the experiences of healthcare workers stationed alongside the eGate, with design recommendations for future health screening systems.

LISTENING TO FRICTION

This project taught me something I've carried into every research role since: that the gap between a system achieving its technical objectives and a system being genuinely accepted is wide, and closing it requires listening carefully to the friction. The eGate screened thousands of people. It worked. And yet the qualitative data kept surfacing something the SUS scores couldn't capture — a population of users who felt the system had been done to them rather than for them. Getting that finding into the published research, in a form that could actually shape future deployments, felt like the point of the whole exercis

This research was conducted as part of a Westmead Health Precinct collaboration between the University of Sydney and Sydney Children's Hospitals Network. The project was funded by the University of Sydney and Sydney Children's Hospitals Network.