Stories

While COVID-19 disrupted the practice of medicine across the globe, pre-clinical medical students, not yet trained to volunteer on the front lines, searched for ways to channel their unique expertise to serve communities outside of the hospital. This article details how four Dell Medical students led interprofessional teams of undergraduate students in prototyping biomedical devices, including a strength assessment tool for use in telehealth appointments and a low-cost pneumatic ventilator for emergency situations. It also discusses the challenges and solutions the students found while navigating the design process virtually.

Dr. Thomas Ungar is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the psychiatrist-in-chief at St. Michael’s Hospital, part of Unity Health Toronto. In this interview, Journal editor Nada Dorman talks with Dr. Ungar about prostates, the pandemic and how design can change the future of mental health.

Crisis situations spotlight system failures and require us to rapidly innovate and adapt in response. When it comes to health, COVID-19 has emphasized broader issues in the health system and has shown how focusing on health care alone is not enough. Holistic and whole-person considerations—spanning brain health, food access, and economic security, etc.—are essential to community health. Based on work done at the Design Institute for Health during COVID-19, a team of health designers shares lessons they learned from adapting community services to the crisis and how designers might learn from the discipline of social work to champion solutions that broaden equity and access.

The core of the Gembah mission is to demystify and democratize the product creation process. They believe product innovation shouldn't exist only in stuffy boardrooms or behind the closed doors of heavily capitalized companies. Their process allows bootstrapping entrepreneurs and small businesses alike to innovate alongside Gembah's team of deeply experienced product designers, researchers, and manufacturing experts to bring their product vision to life. The beautiful thing about e-commerce and product development is its borderless nature. Gembah's workflows leverage resources internationally, including boots-on-the-ground experts worldwide, to help people turn concepts into a workable, market-ready product.

Earlier this year, a team from the Design Institute for Health began working on improving social service coordination in affordable housing communities in East Austin. They soon found themselves needing to pivot from in-person to more frequent virtual services as stay-at-home orders rolled out locally in March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced needs from community members who had not engaged in the previous months of the team’s services rollout. This article focuses on the role of trust and relationships within the community and low-tech solutions as a means of increasing access to and engagement with newly designed service offerings.

How might we design spaces to be inclusive for all? Society is scrambling to accommodate the needs of post-pandemic functions while at the same time satisfying health requirements. This challenge coincides with a movement towards greater humanity and equality among all people — a push to truly confront racism at the root. Drawing from his research designing and managing creative spaces, Smith ponders the ways we can lead societal growth through redefining the spaces we form and occupy.

Good design happens when there are more constraints as it forces the designer to focus on what is essential. Social good has been a recurring theme in modern industrial design and serves as a constraint that forces better designs. Industrial design came about in the 20s and 30s and replaced the bespoke, handmade products of the previous generation with mass-produced, accessible products. Thinking about the end-to-end lifecycle of a product, this article examines an industrial designer's ability to make design decisions that account for global sourcing, the environment, and current social trends.

In this article, designers Gray Garmon and Katie Krummeck explore how to build capacity in people new to the design process in order to empower those closest to the challenges facing communities to make change. In the fall of 2019, the Aga Khan Foundation asked Garmon and Krummeck to create a design-based innovation process for schools participating in the global Schools2030 initiative. The resulting process, led by teachers, is open-ended and adaptable for the cultural contexts and resource constraints of each unique school. In response to the global shutdown, Krummeck and Garmon pivoted to create an online design sprint organized around addressing the challenges to learning that arose during the coronavirus pandemic.

For the past four years, designer Jared Culp has been carless by choice. But COVID and several months of mandatory isolation shined a new light on the dirty car dependence he had been avoiding. A car is a source of freedom. It brings people together in a time when we can only see our neighbors through mask and shields. What was once a source of luxury is now mandatory in most states and cities. In this article, Jared explores how we got here and the possibility of how we get around in the future in the wake of the current pandemic.

Santa Monica College’s Interaction Design (IxD) program was created to fill an equity gap in the emerging field of interaction design. Students apply to the IxD program because it makes financial sense — and because it might be their only option. The program attracts diverse students who, given their circumstances, might not otherwise be able to pursue tech-focused careers. Yet while the school is surrounded by tech’s biggest companies in Silicon Beach, many of these companies have failed to embrace the program and its students. Why? This paper focuses on the semester-long Design Challenges the program has done with tech neighbors in Santa Monica’s Silicon Beach (including Hulu, Bird, and Red Bull), highlights what works and what doesn’t, and offers a call to action to big tech to do even more in diversifying their workforce.