source: www.designcouncil.info/RED/health

Abstract: This project made people, patients and front-line workers collaborate by brainstorming ideas, critiquing concepts, testing things out in context and suggesting improvements.

The process of innovation consists in introducing patients, professionals and interested people’s collaboration in order to develop factors of innovation in the health field instead of the traditional “lab research-based” methods.

“By 2010, one in ten of us will have diabetes. […]
We need to design new types of services that tap into people’s motivations and relate to their daily lives. […]
Working with the Bolton Diabetes Network and Kent County Council over nine months in 2004/5, RED designed and prototyped two new health services.”

One of the results of this process is called Me2, a system that supports and enables people to live well with type 2 diabetes.

“These services are designed to be co-created by people and professionals. They represent a shift in thinking in the way we approach preventative healthcare, and demonstrate how design can be used to put patient centred thinking into practice.”

Driver 

Economic / Industrial

Growing importance of specific users -like patients suffering diabetes- joined as associations that, due to their numbers and their specific needs, can assure pharmaceutical companies a valuable market target and therefore prompt research in specific fields.

Political

Public health institutions — as main actors in the field — is helping making such semi-public programs effective.

Design / Art

Obstacle

Political

Public health institutions also have to actively contribute in spreading the concept in order to reach a wider effect.

Indication

Change in current innovation patterns

Health is a field that until now has been driven by research and administration alone.
This weak signal introduces how new factors like user-centred approach can contribute to the field. The focus seems to be placed more on ill persons and their needs than on the illness itself.

Sector specifics / cultural specifics

This weak signal is specific to the health sector.

Source

Internet

www.designcouncil.info/mt/RED/health/

www.designcouncil.info/mt/RED/health/REDHealth01.mov