Brown2020

Great design starts with empathy for human needs, and great designers gain their insights by immersing themselves in the world and looking at challenges through the eyes of their users. That is the philosophy of IDEO, one the most innovative and successful design firms in the world.

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to hear a thought provoking presentation on innovation and design thinking by the CEO of IDEO, Tim Brown. Tim described the lengths to which IDEO designers go to understand the point of view of their users and then to generate a stream of prototypes as they experiment and try out ideas. Prototyping is part of the learning process. Insights are more likely to come spending time with extreme users, the youngest and the oldest, and the most challenged.

Here is a presentation by IDEO from the First Conference and Intensive Training on User-Centered Design in May 2008 which conveys the IDEO design process and basic principles of design thinking:

Nowhere is the IDEO approach to human centered design more necessary than in health care, where we spend more resources than any other sector of our economy and yet we still have the greatest unmet needs. While I was CEO of Health Hero Network, we partnered with IDEO to design the first Health Buddy device for home health monitoring. Here is a sketch from the Health Buddy design patent that we received on the in-home appliance that served as the front end for a home health monitoring service:

Health Buddy Design Patent Sketch

Our goal with Health Buddy was to enable people with chronic conditions to effortlessly record health status information at home and share it with remote care providers over the Internet. We hoped to enable caregivers to identify problems early and do a better job of educating and supporting patients at home to prevent more serious problems that would lead to hospitalization.

The first design challenge that I gave IDEO was to enable my grandmother to communicate meaningful information with her nurse over the Internet using just one trembling knuckle. The second challenge was to use design to deliver a friendly, supportive and compassionate interface to remote caregivers so that patients would feel comfortable in sharing information daily about health issues that most people would rather not think about.

The collaboration with IDEO was tremendously successful in creating an better interface to chronic care from the home. The most common response from our users was that they “felt like someone was there for them.” Hospitalizations were reduced, patients adhered to treatment, and caregiver productivity improved. Now if only the design of the economic models of health care could catch up to advances in designing a better chronic care model!