Strategic Design

Strategic Design linked insights about what people really want to the volatile world of business models and flexible production. Responding to market research saying customers wanted more functions and features, companies exploded their offerings, confusing customers with too many products and confounding their own abilities to manage its offerings. Strategic design links insights about what people really want, to the volatile world of business, supporting executives as they move from the predictable context of the economy of scale to the chaos of the economy of choice we have today. For example...

Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design (HCD) emerged as growing consumer culture drove the need for everyday product designs that were helpful and worked well but increasingly used complex information making them more difficult to use.  In one example, 200,000+ medication infusion pumps were recalled when pumps were frequently turned off rather than delivering medications because the power button was positioned too closely to the initiation button. HCD incorporates end users, prioritizing our understanding of people, their aspirations, and their activities to ensure solutions are actually helpful. This ideology has been the foundation for Apple’s success, with products that usable and functional yet simple enough to seamlessly integrate into people’s lives.  

Design for Well-being

Design for Well-Being aims to do more than make products easier to use or services easier to access by integrating people’s intangible values into what is designed. Public health’s current approaches ignore the sources of human values or reduce them to commodities because they are difficult to measure. We have detailed calculations for the cost of treating depression but are less skilled at calculating the value of being happy. We know the specific protocols for treating the physical outcomes of aging but know little about how to integrate them how older people envision a “good life”. We know the positive effects of quitting smoking but don’t know how to solve the systemic and entrenched causes of stress anxiety that are momentarily relieved through smoking. 

Design for Well-Being provides frameworks and methods to integrate the multitude of interconnected facets of health, happiness, and prosperity into research and practice.  By attending to people’s values, aspirations, behavior, society, and the natural environment, Design for Wellbeing expands public health’s ability to deal with complex and ambiguous problems