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By Designdialogues, on April 20th, 2011 We’re at CHI 2011 Vancouver, Tuesday May 10 for this Special Interest Group. Please join us if you’re at CHI!
Abstract
This CHI 2011 SIG provides a workshop for collective problem finding and community identification. The goal is to initiate a working group to coordinate systemic design research issues across practitioner communities. This SIG addresses the insufficiency of user-centered design and informatics research to design for system and service-level innovations in healthcare. The SIG seeks to coordinate communications and participation across design practice, research disciplines, and areas of health practice for service system innovation.
About: The SIG addresses the problem of coordinating and advancing systems design and design research for service-level and systemic innovations in healthcare.
Healthcare is a domain characterized by multiple stakeholders (from consumers and patients to clinical staff, from administrators to insurers), multiple services (from primary care to academic institutional networks), and multiple sectors of services (from clinical practice to insurance and government). There are no definitive “users” in these complex systems of practice, few common workflows, and with highly dispersed informatics, no integration. The ability to design at the service and systems level is seriously mitigated by these inherent and ongoing issues.
The methodologies and analytical regimes associated with user-centered, experience, and service design practices are valuable in many contexts, but limit design options when employed for complex systems. With a wide variety of stakeholders and differing clinical and economic problem owners, healthcare has no common voice and fewer “whole system” solutions. In practice, design and implementation decisions are fraught with competing interests, often imposing near-term decisionmaking on IT and practice changes. Design/research professionals are often isolated in narrow bands of problem scope, with the inability to design to root cause issues or to scale their successes across institutions or across practices. Policy advocates and key advisors in the field are widely separated by problem scope (disease management, education, insurance reform) and problem-solving modality (policy, practice innovation, patient-centered medicine, information systems).
The organizers call for a network of coordination of communications and participation across design practice and research disciplines, and areas of health practice. Informatics and service designers are natural integrators across fields of knowledge and practice, and are hampered in effective solutions when working in dedicated, narrow sectors of the field. While it may not be necessary to form a new organization or group, the organizers see the opportunity for a working network that can begin to work across discourse communities, coordinate research and service prototypes, and integrate practice concepts, emerging findings and key stakeholders toward these concerns.
Full abstract online: Healthcare Design SIG CHI11
By Designdialogues, on April 19th, 2011 The first Healthcare Experience Design conference, a one-day symposium held in Boston April 11, sold out with nearly 300 participants across all sectors and industries. The program selected leading speakers and designers in four tracks of presentations:
- Patient-Centric Design
- Designing for Care: Provider Interfaces and Care Environments
- Facilitating Engagement
- New Models for Healthcare Delivery
Keynote speaker was BJ Fogg of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, with a physically interactive talk on designing for persuasion that required managing latex gloves, floss, and instructions prepared for hundreds of sealed envelopes.
Because things were organized in tracks, I was speaking in “Designing for Care” and missed Matthew Diamanti’s talk on People are the Product in the Patient-Centered Care track. I’m waiting for the videos to become available (soon) so we can see watch those presentations at leisure.
The symposium brought together designers and leaders across a wide range of healthcare sectors. There is something new and inaugural about this meeting, like attending CHI for the first time in its early years. This is just the start of something, big, as designers, researchers and institutions are starting to find new ways of creating health value for people and patients.
Healthcare spends millions on clinical and business technology, but health institutions continue to lag most other industries in innovative design and IT. (However, this is not in itself a service problem – efficiencies in healthcare are not ever gained by IT alone). The need for service, process, and interaction innovation is clear, but now the desire to forge change is apparent at the leading institutions (Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser, Sloan Kettering were all in attendance).
Some primary trends I’m seeing and the companies guiding those trends:
See all presentations and speakers
In Experience Design as Creative Care I raised these issues:
- We (designers) are a new role in health institutions, and have a high credibility hurdle.
- Earning trust takes time. Designers are still inexperienced in critical domain knowledge.
- Our skills are tactical & not clinical (and not strategic, even if we think so.) That will take time to change. We need to develop strong design research portfolios.
- Our user-centered language is often irrelevant to doctors. (And who’s a “user” in healthcare?)
- Always think: “How does (my) design help patients?”
What is Design for Care about?
- Targeting design interventions to whole systems and services, not products and interfaces.
- If the aim is improving patient experience and performance at the point of care, we need to rethink the service design and care flows for practitioners.
- Think (IBM) service systems. Not users.
- Designers need to patiently develop a shared language understood and effective in healthcare.
- We (UX) need to start sharing design research & practices across sectors, centers, locations
By Designdialogues, on April 10th, 2011 Southern Illinois University Carbondale recently held the Synergetics conference, a symposium revival of Buckminster Fuller’s work, faculty, and former students at his last major home institution. Invited speakers included former Design students and faculty Bill Lunderman (Colgate) and Larry Busch.
Invited speakers included me, Jennifer Rice (Fruitful Strategy), and Steelcase’s Melissa DeSota. Keynote was Thomas Zung, Fuller’s architect collaborator and archivist. This year they are also saving domes and putting a large one up at his former residence, and recovering his legacies. placing our current sustainability thinking in line with his lifelong dream of a world that works for everyone.
A slide in my talk Collaborating for Complexity credits Fuller as the first philosopher of Thrivability, the reach beyond sustainability that we strive for in socially systemic innovation.
In Critical Path Fuller said:
“The success of all humanity can be accomplished only by a terrestrially comprehensive, technologically competent, design revolution. This revolution must develop artifacts where energy-use efficiency not only occasions the artifacts’ spontaneous adoption by humanity, but also occasions the inadvertent, unregretted abandonment and permanent obsolescence of socially and economically undesirable viewpoints, customs and practices.”
Fuller always pushed the boundaries of the possible and created the models and technology to prove his points. He would have been unimpressed with the progress we are collectively (not) making on global sustainability for human habitation, ecology, and economy. The conference also engaged participants directly in cluster groups to work directly on product development sustainability exercises (rethinking emergency shelter, consumer electronics, and mobility). An exciting diversity of creative thinking was brought to the 2 half-day sessions, and as I left Friday afternoon the conference was still in full gear. The real treasure of a small engaged conference like this was the ability to really meeting and converse with people from so many other design backgrounds than mine.
By Designdialogues, on March 27th, 2011 Congratulations to the OCADU team for winning the Rotman Design Challenge!
The team from our first year OCAD University graduate program MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation won the Rotman Design Challenge on Saturday, for a high-touch (not high-tech) proposal for Mayo Clinic for early disease prevention, Mayo Moms. Mayo Moms leveraged a known health issue (lack of breast feeding culture in US) with a well-framed solution (human-to-human network sponsored by Mayo) with a sophisticated research approach and simple yet spectacular graphical design values.
Our school’s team had only two weeks (those starting early had 3 weeks) and they beat 20 entries, with great finalists from U Cincinnati’s DAAP and school of business, Cal College of Arts, Case Western, and of course several great entries from Rotman.
The $1500 award and first place went to a 5-person team of:
- Jen Chow, team captain
- Martin Ryan
- Josina Vink
- Jessica Mills
- Phouphet Sivaphong
Look out for more great work from this program over the year.
Toronto , March 7, 2011 – Students from institutions across North America who are recognized for their groundbreaking work in design thinking will be coming to Toronto on March 25 and 26 to tackle a “wicked problem” in the second annual Rotman Design Challenge. This year’s Challenge is an international one, with a number of US graduate and undergraduate programs participating including the California College of the Arts, the Darden School of Business, the School of Visual Arts, the University of Cincinnati and the Weatherhead School of Management.
By Designdialogues, on March 17th, 2011 On Design Observer Bruce Nussbaum wants to fail Financial Times’ top 100 business schools.
Let’s Give an “F” to the FT List of Best Business Schools
OK, at least some of them. But it is hard to argue with their top 10 – Stanford has the d.school link, and Wharton is a top systems and organizational design school. We would push U Toronto’s Rotman and Case Western well up the list (even though Rotman scores pretty well overall.)
Let’s first clarify the purpose of management education. Getting past the “cool idea” phase of enhancing business education by integrating creative design, what is it that is being enhanced? The practice of management, finance, organizational leadership, or marketing? (It is marketing primarily, which has a long history with creative professionals in advertising, market research, and product management.)
When we consider creativity, design freedom, and inspired ways of knowing, the business disciplines are not where we usually look first. I appreciate that design and arts should be influential in the transformation of other disciplines. But why focus on just business? Since people employed as designers typically work in business environments and are subject to the strategies and decisions made by MBAs, the relationship can seem a little one-sided. Design continue to do more of the contribution to an enterprise that is largely defined by the MBA. Should designers also influence strategic decision making?
Bruce cites Facebook and Twitter as kinds of new examples for creative business design. And Groupon, which is 100% business model innovation and almost an anti-design service. But Twitter evolved from a technical RSS tool, and it still has no business model. Facebook was from the Bill Gates Harvard dropout model. Good business is about capturing and sustaining value and being “just innovative enough.” Good design is more planning than play, it is more intentional than something like Twitter, which was not exactly planned that way.
Is the transformation of business education really that different than for other education? Why not also fail engineering schools and computer science programs? Isn’t this where the tech inventions come from? Most successful startups and sustainable innovations were not started in the university setting. But why not encourage a startup model in non-business disciplines? Schools are testbeds and collaboratories. They should be places where learners are free to try and fail.
Bruce cites Facebook and Twitter as kinds of new examples for creative business design. And Groupon, which is 100% business model innovation and almost an anti-design service. But Twitter evolved from a technical RSS tool, and it still has no business model. Facebook was from the Bill Gates Harvard dropout model. Good business is very often not innovative, but about capturing and sustaining value and being “just innovative enough.”
Let’s go on. Why not fail social sciences? What contribution has it made to addressing or intervening in the underlying socially systemic problems creating turmoil in economies, governments, organizations, institution? If we could reinvent university systems we might see more creative impacts in every field of discourse. We don’t see much progress in institutional innovation and compared to the utopian 1960′s social sciences do not seem as invested in the Big Issues.
What do business graduates consider successful? Do people go to business school to become creative design-oriented leaders? Then why don’t we see former MBA’s in MDes programs then for a second Masters? (OK, at OCADU MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, we are seeing a few MBAs and we’re doing our best to un-brainwash them!)
Inventing what becomes valuable is elusive and not a direct product of the linear analysis that an MBA needs to run the shop. So rather than fuss over MBAs, who have a world of choice at their command, why not consider the role of innovative thinking in early education? Andrea Kuszewski just wrote on this in the Scientific American blog You can increase your intelligence. Perhaps it makes sense to return the arts to underfunded elementary and secondary education, and to increase support for the arts, design, and liberal arts in a broadly-based transdisciplinary curriculum for younger learners. Then perhaps MBA students would already be creative upon entering their programs.
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Realizations by Peter Jones Whether from fear or habit, our culture is not innovating the democratic change sufficient to our time. We face an urgent challenge to make the differences that effect changes that so many seek.
Our cultural and social institutions have peaked out, but in their wiley senescence they have protected themselves from structural innovation. From healthcare to finance, politics to education, infrastructures & decision processes, we can & must reinvent social futures. Our societal systems have grown beyond their capacity to transform by management. Collaboration alone is insufficient - We truly need new cultures of co-innovation, collectively deciding, and socially organizing.
A community of practice meets for these dialogues in person every 2nd Wednesday in Toronto:
Art, science, and design are different ways of knowing. In the fields of action (business, community, and social co-creation) they regenerate each other. All ways of knowing are invited to the dance of change, if we are to interfere & reinvent our values and systems to open these possibilities. Your participation is required.
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