Our expert answers 3 Questions
As the program director of the Stamps Master of Design in Integrative Design (MDes) program I hope to work together, with, and for faculty from across IHPI with my graduate students. Over the course of the two-year graduate program, each MDes cohort forms a pro-bono integrative design firm of sorts, collaborating as a team on hands-on projects alongside our stakeholders, partners, and constituents. We are particularly interested in opportunities to bring and share our human-centered design methods to clinical settings.
Design is a process by which aesthetic, cultural, social, technical and economic potential is imagined and then translated to give order to objects, environments and activities. Typically, we live with the lingering impression of design from the Industrial Revolution, where it was deployed to make engineered artifacts culturally, socially, economically, symbolically, and practically acceptable to a mass market. We are living in a moment when the domain of design has expanded beyond this condition. This has created new opportunities for trained designers to initiate and contribute to meaningful social change. However, this will require humility and the creation of new models of collaboration.
Designers have a lot to offer. We can help our partners establish patient-centered goals and needs, develop coherent visions for change, facilitate participation with different stakeholders, prototype iterative experiments aimed at organizational change, and draw upon a large toolbox of different methods to address wicked problems.