**1. Introduction**

Health is defined as a state of complete physical, social, and mental well-being and not merely the absence of illness, disease, or infirmity [1, 2]. Sociologist Aaron Antonovsky (1923–1994), the father of the *salutogenesis*, interpreted health as a "sense of coherence" or "becoming" rather than "being." Health (*salus*) is continuously being generated (*genesis*) [3]. Individual health is not fixed or static but requires continuous effort to maintain the status of "being healthy" in the process of change to protect against disease or injury. Healthcare is defined as "the

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

organized provision of medical care to individuals or a community" [4]. Continuous healthcare focuses not on the treatment of disease but on the continuum of health management for curing, recovering, and healing through medical treatment, nursing, and caring throughout an individual's entire life within the systematic structure [5, 6]. In the provision of such services, communication between consumers and providers should be empathetic [2, 4]. Furthermore, there should be a strong social awareness of public healthcare services that are available. Therapeutic interactions through empathy make it possible to have insight into another person's thoughts or feelings, which, as we shall see, is vital to *salutogenic* healthcare [7, 8].

It is necessary for consumers to efficiently communicate with their healthcare providers in a safe, reliable, and informative way. Previous studies have reported that design should play an integral part in facilitating communication [6, 9, 10]. Recently, convergence research (or transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity) has been vigorously pushed forward [11], which entails integrating knowledge, theories, methods, data, and expertise from different disciplines and forming new frameworks, paradigms, or even disciplines to catalyze innovation across multiple research communities [6, 10, 11]. Healthcare design as a newly emerging discipline is an example of this approach, which focuses on therapeutic interactions between space and behavior for creating healing environments and improving health outcomes [6, 9, 10, 12, 13].

The importance of communication in healthcare has gained considerable attention especially with the rise of the concept of patient-centered care [14–17]. The patient-centered care model [16] stresses elements of health communication such as open-ended inquiry, reflective listening, empathy, and the identity (values and preferences) of individuals [17]. Designing messages effectively can serve as a medium of social communication [6, 10]. The goal of this interdisciplinary effort is to integrate design into health communication. Healthcare message design (HMD) is a new concept that needs to be defined philosophically and theoretically, which blends scientific disciplines in a coordinated, reciprocal way *to* develop effective ways of communicating across disciplines by adopting common frameworks and a new scientific language. This chapter introduces the concept of HMD based on philosophical underpinnings and theoretical frameworks and defines the process of HMD, which encompasses information, sustainability, partnership, publicness, integrity, and health promotion [6, 10]. Practically, it is expected that the content discussed in this chapter can provide a basis for future research on the implementation of HMD toward social communication.

**3. Healthcare message design**

**Figure 1.** Conceptual framework.

painful face deprived of everything.

Communication means (1) information exchange by speaking, writing, or using some other medium, (2) the successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings, and (3) social contact by means of sending or receiving information [21]. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) provided the philosophical premise of communication and proposed the concept of *ӓsthetische Kommunikation* in the *Critique of Judgment* [22, 23]. *Social communication of beauty* should include not only the other but also the self; thereby, a social sharing of emotion is possible. Previous research has focused on efficient communication between providers and consumers fostered through mutual empathy [24, 25]. Emmanuel Lévinas stated, "The *Subject* is absorbed in the object it absorbs, and nevertheless keeps a distance" [26]. He also defined "the *Other* [as] an absolutely different person." Lévinas added that the Object is represented to the Subject as a

Healthcare Message Design toward Social Communication: Convergence Based…

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Empathy, which is the ability to understand the others in their experience, can make communication easier through a shared metaphor such as *beauty* or design [8, 22]. The philosophical underpinnings of empathy date back to Kant, who related empathy to the universal sense of *beauty* between the Subject and the Object [22, 23]. Kant utilized the term *Gemeinsinn* (*sensus communis*) to describe the universal sharing of the sense of *beauty*. *Ӓsthetischer Gemeinsinn* (*sensus communis aestheticus*), referred to by Kant as *ӓsthetische Kommunikation* [23], made an
