Natalie Campbell (B.F.A., Design, 2017) is a visual designer at the Design Institute for Health, a partnership between the Dell Medical School and the College of Fine Arts dedicated to applying a creative design-based approach to the nation’s health care challenges. Campbell interned at the Design Institute as a communication designer after excelling on a class project for the organization in a Design classes taught by James Walker. Shortly after graduating from UT, she joined the team full time as a visual designer, and in that role, she focuses on creating visual design assets on projects where digital or physical interactions are critical components of the user journey. We caught up with her recently to learn more about her work and interest in designing for health care.
Have you always been interested in that intersection between design and health care?
I had been interested in design and health care because the types of design problems I really like are the really complicated ones. Things with the environment, health care, any larger problems because, to me, it's so much more satisfying to see those problems in some way helped by design. In my first year of school, I had seen this product for carrying water in some third-world country. It was humanitarian work, and I had no idea that design could be that. So that was just really inspiring.
From there, my older sister got into health care, and I got to hear all the time about how the systems and services weren't done well or designed well. And then I'd also seen firms like IDEO create medical products that were solving big problems. That was really cool and is more exciting to me than, "Oh, we need a book layout." I knew I wanted to go into health care or something a bit more complicated, so when I found out about the Design Institute for Health, it definitely piqued my interest.
How did your idea of what design was change while you were an undergraduate? It sounds like it shifted significantly, expanding your definition of what it could do.
I transferred to UT, so my first year of school at my other school, I thought design was about making products and seeing what worked, and that's it. And I learned that it's really about problem-solving. It's not about the thing or the form that you're making. It's so much more complicated and broad than that. It felt so much more satisfying to work on stuff like that. Before, I came from a fine arts background, and it was kind of nice to paint or draw things for me, but the fact that I could make something and have people use it and have it solve a problem or have a particular use, that was really rewarding for me. That just seemed really cool, and it felt awesome to do all that. So my definition of design expanded once I started learning more about the history of design and industrial design and product design. I knew some about graphic design, but when I started learning about product design and all areas of design, it was really expanding my idea of what that was.
What's it like working at the Design Institute for Health?
I’m still learning stuff every day about health care. There are abbreviations that are used, and I'm like, "Ok, you need to explain to me what that is." I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
Tell me about some of the projects you've been working since you've been here on staff.
Right now, we've been doing a lot of stuff for Dell Med’s new clinics opening in the Health Transformation Building. I've been helping on some visual assets for different projects for that. The clinics we’re opening offer a completely new model of care, in a brand new space that’s eliminated waiting rooms so patients self-room, and then there are like 20 new pieces of technology. There is so much design needed to create good experiences for the patients and the care teams in this new environment.
What's the best part of your job here?
The people that I work with, definitely. Even though I've just now started my career, they're all really great, and I could easily call everyone a mentor. They're mentoring me because they really want to help me succeed, and I learn a lot from them. It wouldn't be the same if I was doing the exact same work somewhere else where maybe I didn’t like the environment I was in. I think maybe my favorite part is the people and how much I can learn from all of them because they all have a lot of really great specialties. I come in, and I'm excited to see everyone every day.
What's the most challenging part of your job?
How complicated some of the problems we're trying to solve can get. It's not just like "We need to design new patient gowns." We're designing these whole new systems and organizations that are really complicated that aren't a tactile object that we're making. So the fact that it feels way more abstract to me, that we're working on organizational and systems design—that's really hard to sometimes comprehend.
And on top of that, it's health care. I already don't really understand everything about health care and how it works. I'll go on a project, and I'll have assumptions for maybe how a certain department works from what I've known in the past. And I'm learning that it's not actually what I thought. I have to learn about health care and design and organizational design at the same time, and it's not all a tangible thing. Your head can hurt sometimes trying to figure out how to have something work. But it's more rewarding, I think, when you finish a project around something like that.