When Nurses Meet Vibe-Coding: Shifting from Problem Talk to Situated Specification in Participatory Design
Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Vibe-CodingParticipatory DesignLLMHealthcare
Can seeing a working idea change a design conversation?
Nurses understand the problems in their daily work, but a design workshop can leave those ideas at the level of discussion. We explored whether building prototypes with an LLM during the workshop helps participants turn their concerns into more concrete design decisions.
Prototype while the discussion is happening
Five clinical nurses took part in a 110-minute workshop about an electronic medical record interface. Real-time LLM-assisted prototyping turned their suggestions into working screens. We analyzed what they said during the workshop and their responses afterward.
The conversation became more specific
Participants moved from describing general problems toward specifying screen elements, conditions, and possible failure cases. Having something concrete to respond to helped make tacit work knowledge visible. Participants also reported a stronger sense of agency in the design process.
A promising way to connect participation and implementation
Rapid prototypes can give domain experts more to work with than an abstract proposal. The contribution is a workshop method and preliminary observations from five participants. It does not establish that the prototypes are clinically validated or ready for deployment, or that the same effects will occur in every participatory design setting.
Read the original abstract
Participatory Design (PD) empowers end-users as co-designers, yet contemporary practice often reduces PD to ideation workshops where users contribute ideas but remain excluded from implementation. This gap stems from an asymmetry in technical knowledge—users cannot experience how their ideas translate into working systems, limiting feedback to abstract problem framing. We conducted a 110-minute workshop with five clinical nurses designing an EMR interface, incorporating real-time “vibe coding”—LLM-assisted prototyping that transforms verbal descriptions into functional interfaces within minutes. Through thematic analysis of utterances and post-session surveys, we observed shifts in design articulation: from abstract problem statements toward situated specifications referencing concrete screen elements, conditional triggers, and failure modes. Participants reported enhanced agency, identifying as co-creators rather than passive informants. We contribute a methodological template for integrating vibe coding into PD and preliminary observations suggesting that real-time implementation may help surface tacit domain knowledge and reconnect implementation with genuine participation.