Why Would You Need Design?
I recently had a discussion with my father during a hike along the white chalk cliffs in the national park on Rügen, Germany. He told me bemused that the Inselspital — the university hospital of Bern — invested heavily in programs aimed at combining design and medical care. He said he wouldn’t understand how medical care could benefit from adding design to it.
His confusion comes from the fact that design is regularly used to describe the creation of visual or tangible artifacts. For example, Norman Potter writes in his book What is a designer that design is an activity that gives “form and order to life arrangements.” I like the expression life arrangements but it’s too vague.
The definition of design in Merriam Webster’s dictionary is broader and could serve as a first reference point to explain why medical care could benefit from design activities:
: to plan and make decisions about (something that is being built or created)
: to create the plans, drawings, etc., that show how (something) will be made
We can conclude that design is an activity that happens when it’s not yet clear how you get from point A to point B. Thus, design is linked with planning but also the execution of a project.
In that conclusion lies the hint that design is inherently strategic. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines strategy as:
: a careful plan or method : a clever stratagem
Both the creation of a strategy and design are therefore activities that involve the planning of an outcome.
Designers, in general, learn how to think about problems and how to find solutions for those problems. Designers of visual communication, for example, are tasked to find a suitable form for a message. Understanding the message is the first step. The second step is to research and find out how the message can be perceived differently. Third, the planning part is how the message will be communicated effectively. Finally, applying visual design principles to underscore the message is the execution.
The overused saying of thinking out of the box applies to design. To find solutions for problems, designers have to look at the problem from different angles, in the best case that leads to solutions whose initial issues weren’t considered before.
So, how can the area of medical care benefit from design activities? Health care consists of many touchpoints, where design plays an integral part. On a basic level, you could say that medical devices, for example, have to be designed so that they are properly operated. But the processes in hospitals and in care are designed as well. Designers can support medical experts in rethinking the processes and strategies in a hospital and find solutions for problems the medical practitioners didn’t even consider a pain point in the first place.