Design For Health - Background
I think it’s fair to say I’ve had a crush on design and design thinking since roughly middle school.
A San Francisco native, my first exposure to the concept was learning of the local design firm IDEO on “career day”. Though merely from a distance, I was intrigued by this concept of “design” suddenly having new meaning: not just a fancy word that was about color and aesthetic, but rather, a mindset that was about new ideas and solutions.
But beyond any “career”, it was the spirit of “blending” embedded in this view of design that really made my heart skip a beat. I didn’t realize there were places focused on design and healthcare and business innovation and toy re-imagination, all in one. Or that this crossing of disciplines - through a design framework backbone - could lead to impactful outcomes.
Though I don’t think my seventh-grade self could put a name to it, this concept and approach was reflecting back to me a flavor of “blending” that I felt running through the DNA of my own life and passions.
A serial non-committer from first grade through college graduation, I was never one for “picking something”. It was always one foot in the art studio and one foot in the pre med lab…or the sports field… or the dance stage. Design, as I newly understood it, seemed to be a place where you didn’t have to pick. Each element was an asset, the mix of which could ultimately lead to something new and better.
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When it finally came time to get a “real job” (then on the east coast) my search was pretty quickly narrowed exclusively to companies that featured venn diagrams on their websites. Ideally noting an overlap between creativity and health or medicine. I was looking to marry my interests, wondering, “How am I going to mix the creativity of art and design and my love of health medicine in the ‘real world’”?
As luck would have it, the coming decade found me plunged into multiple real-world intersections of these interests. Suddenly I was no longer googling venn diagrams; I was living in one.
My first years in the healthcare industry were spent in healthcare branding and marketing. Writing bylines, creating “mechanism of action” videos, and creatively bringing to life the messages of health and biotech companies. I got what I wanted - an interdisciplinary experience - but ultimately felt pulled to focus more on patient medicine and healthcare.
Located in Boston, I quite literally hopped the river to “medical mecca” and landed at Mass General Hospital (MGH), and more specifically, at the Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation, which ultimately gave me another chance to put some of this “real world design” to the test.
I spent the next several years on research projects that were both strongly medical, grounded in studying real patients moving through the hospital system, as well as strongly innovative - focused on the design of both primary care delivery and the processes for patient decision making.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, these projects were seeds of seeing how design could impact both individual patient experiences and the healthcare system at large.
Being in the hospital network (and later at Ariadne Labs - a joint center for health systems innovation) was like being at the Disneyland of interdisciplinary topics in medicine. To this day, I still have my notes from lectures given on the aesthetics behind neurological imaging; yoga’s effect on stem cell transplants; how practicing story-telling can make you a better physician; or interdisciplinary methods to treat addiction. I even had the chance to participate in a Radcliffe Institute Seminar entitled, “Designing Beautiful Decisions”, where a group of Ph.Ds., design thinking experts, writers, and a movement choreographer were invited from around the world to discuss how to help patients make the best health decisions.
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There I was, engrossed in this medical “Disneyland”, when life took a left turn: I veered off the ride of researcher and soon-to-be medical student, and on to the ride of full-time patient.
Though neither planned nor fun, the circumstance offered me a chance to put my favorite activity to work: blending. Turns out I didn’t have to work as hard as I thought for these intersections.
A true nerd, during the peak years of disease, I continued to study. Though not the “grad school” I anticipated, in a way, I made my own. Over the course of several years, I have taken eight courses from IDEO U (the educational branch of the design firm, IDEO), earning an Advanced Certificate in Design Thinking, and continuing to work towards a certificate in Change Leadership. Equally as impactful to my creative studies have been the many books, lectures, and teachings I have devoured from big thinkers in the creative field, (Elizabeth Gilbert, Rick Rubin, Chase Jarvis, to name a few), listening to every talk I could get my hands on from inspiring creative minds and thinkers, while also developing my own creative process. In parallel, I was also inhaling copious amounts of information about health and the healthcare system. Some of it by default, living and navigating the system with significant disease, some of it by interest and online courses, and some of it by sheer curiosity.
Suddenly, the core principles of design and creativity and their application to healthcare and medicine seemed both natural and endless.
Since design - in all its forms - is mostly about the end user, empathy quickly becomes a core ingredient. It’s hard to do anything for an end user if empathy is not at the core. This golden ingredient is also a key reason that design lends itself nicely to healthcare, an industry where empathy is also on the essentials list.
But the single thing that has struck me most from consuming lessons and ideas from both industries is how much possibility exists for new perspectives when one steps back to see the overlap.
There have been numerous times when my jaw has dropped listening to leaders in creative fields, design experts, public health and medical professionals, integrative healers, etc., realizing that there are some very core threads running through their ideas. It struck me as interesting that, when listened to with a close ear, there are places where a renowned record producer, creative writer, medical professional, and architect are all - in essence - saying the same thing. This left me wondering how investigating where these fields complement each other could generate new “lightbulb moments” or solutions.
They say every good design project starts with a question. When it comes to the intersection of design and health, there are countless to choose from:
How can applying the creative mindset taught in leading complex design projects be translated to the patient experience?
What impact does the physical design, colors, and space around us have on basic measurements of health?
What can Broadway composers, musicians, and authors teach us about crafting narratives in medicine?
What can a “customer centricity” design project at a top meditation app teach us about who the healthcare system is or is not serving?
Design for Health will explore these types of topics, and look at how cross application of these themes can create new perspectives and hopefully new experiences for designers, patients, and health professionals alike.