What can design do to public health?
On March 2019, Patrick Whitney, founder of the Harvard D-Lab, and the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) faculty director Ashish Jha discussed with HGHI senior editor Stefanie Friedhoff what design can (and can't) do for public health.
The conversation was centered around the persistent challenges in health, and how their root causes are related to user experiences and other aspects of human life. Jha shared his journey from skepticism about design in public health to realizing that the discipline can expand public health’s ability to deal with the complexity of human behavior.
Throughout the conversation, Whitney brings groundbreaking insights about some of the most pressing issues in public health presented by Jha.
Vaccines avoidance, children with asthma, and the inclusion of the elderly are few of examples that provided a context for Patrick and Ashish to explore potential pathways to bridge the gap between design and public health.
Design for Social Innovation Course
Since 2017, students from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and across the University come together at the Harvard iLab over the course of one semester for a new class offered by the D-Lab: Design of Social Innovation. The course is led by Patrick Whitney, Professor in Residence, and Andre Nogueira Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and is designed to give students a hands-on introduction to design methods and frameworks as a complementary approach to complex public health challenges, specially when information is incomplete and fast-changing.
On its first iteration, students were tasked to look at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the way it addresses pandemics, and then design solutions to help it more effectively manage disease outbreaks. To keep their thinking fresh, students were forbidden from researching how WHO already works. They looked at different models of change, made conjectures, and then researched whether their ideas could work.
On its second iteration, students were asked to work with six different organizations in the Boston area and from other cities in the US, dealing with food insecurity, aging, and mobility. Students were exposed to problems that were both socially relevant and rich with business opportunities presented by these organizations. In order to help these organizations, students were involved in diverse activities including gathering and analyzing ethnographic data, identifying patterns in the daily life, reframing problems, using early stage prototypes, concept creation and design of flexible systems and other design practices.
In addition to weekly critiques, the class receives frequent visits from experts in both fields design and public health to discuss students insights, and defend their concepts while learning how to work collaboratively. Usually, students start the class considering “design” as the process of creating a building or smartphone, and leave the course realizing how they can leverage design to tackle large, ambiguous problems in public health.
The Design for Social Innovation course is not about what is, but what might be.
Design Forum: Cities for Health, Happiness, and Prosperity
Together with Professor John Spengler, Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation at the Department of Environmental Health, and Michelle A. Williams, dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the D-Lab hosted a Design Forum to discuss Cities for Health, Happiness, and Prosperity. On May 2019, 30+ researchers and faculty from across the Harvard University came together to explore the uplifting topic of how urban design might promote health, happiness, and prosperity of people and the environment.
The D-Lab was honored to have a Thai delegation from Magnolia Development Corporation (MQDC) joining activities, and sharing their aspirations for Forestias, a progressive mixed-use development in Bangkok. Hands on activities were designed based on frameworks from the Whole View Model to explore collaborative research opportunities to evaluate how urban forms and policies promote happier citizens.
Background
Throughout history, there have been alternate visions of what a city should be, whom it should serve, and its role in the culture from which it grew. Some visions have addressed pragmatic challenges like health and defense. Others have been more symbolic than pragmatic, using design to represent a government’s imperial power, or using architecture to signal that a region had entered the modern world. Most of these visions do not reach their goals because they focus almost exclusively on physical design of streets, parks, and houses; they do not address how people work, learn, play, and carry out activities of daily life. As evidences emerges on connections between health and nature, building materials and hormone disruption, social isolation, climate change and vulnerability, we must look again at our build environments and redesign our cities to promote health, happiness, and prosperity for all.