Research among healthcare staff suggests that redesigning furniture and equipment could enable better cleaning of their surfaces in two ways:
- Cleaning would be more efficient because the items are made easier to clean, by eliminating crevices, rough surfaces, joins and hard-to-reach contours.
- Making previously hard-to maintain items easier and quicker to clean means they are likely to be cleaned more often.
So why bring designers in?
As well as making things that work well and look great, designers bring a highly creative approach to problem-solving that leads to practical, everyday solutions. Good design creates products, services, spaces and experiences that not only satisfy a function but are also desirable, aspirational, compelling and delightful.
Design Bugs Out was a rare opportunity for designers to get involved in the design of non-clinical technology, to take on healthcare problems and solve them. There's very little design in the NHS because the way it's run is so technical and cost sensitive. Colum Menzies Lowe, Design Consultant
Design tools
Designers use a range of tools in their work, some of these are:
Understanding users
...or putting themselves in another person’s shoes. Design research tools can help designers to understand a particular experience from the user’s perspective. This can mean observing how people actually use a piece of equipment, say, or interviewing someone about what they like or dislike about an existing product. The aim is to uncover some of people’s more latent needs and desires — the needs they may not even know they have. Designers who immerse themselves in the context in which a product or service will be used can simultaneously observe, analyse and synthesize — so they understand the problem, work out what to do about it and then put that into action.
Having ideas
In order to find one good idea, designers use tools like brainstorming to help them generate lots of ideas as quickly as possible. They’re also used to working with experts from different fields or disciplines to help them understand the problems and challenges they’re designing for. For example, a product designer might have worked with materials specialists, manufacturers, brand and marketing experts and retailers before their product even gets into the hands of a consumer.
Making things visible
Designers naturally make problems and ideas visible. This can be anything from quickly sketching ideas so that they can share work-in-progress with others to creating frameworks that help to make visual sense of complex information. To do this, designers might create concept sketches, representational diagrams, scenario storyboards, plans, visual frameworks or models and physical mock-ups.
Prototyping and iterating
Designers like to ‘suck it and see’ — by building small-scale mock-ups or prototypes before they commit resources to making the real thing. In business terms, this is a good risk management technique: commit a little and learn a lot; fail early (while it’s cheap) to succeed sooner.
This culture of trying things out quickly, getting feedback in-situ and then iterating the idea is a fast and low-cost way of moving a project forward. Websites can be represented with a paper prototype, products by making quick cardboard or foam mockups. Even services can be tested through role-play that shows how people might interact.