Invent Health: To Infinity and Beyond
By Susannah Fox
This week, members of my team and I are visiting the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the MakerSpace at the University of Texas Medical Branch hospital in Galveston, TX, bringing together designers, clinicians, architects, engineers, scientists, and other experts to talk about the HHS Invent Health initiative.
We will explore the shared challenges we face in sustaining human life in extreme environments here on Earth as well as in space: power-, volume-, and mass-constrained environments like rural Uganda, a hurricane-ravaged city in the U.S., polar expeditions, and the International Space Station.
We will report back on what we learn, but in the meantime I’d love to hear from people about other unexpected partners we should talk with — and what questions we should ask.
For example:
How might we empower small-scale designers, builders, and developers to find creative solutions to challenges we see across the landscape of health and human services?
What will happen when everyone has access to the tools and information they need to solve their own problems — and share their ideas with others?
What might we learn if we push open design principles and tools out to the edges of the network, where humanity lives, where unexpected discoveries happen, where engineers meet artists?
Where do you see people working on creative hardware solutions to health-related challenges?
Where do you see possibility for disruptive innovation in medical and assistive devices?
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Originally published at medium.com on April 11, 2016.
