Transition Design in Healthcare
Last Saturday, I went to a Heath Tech Conference about bringing health tech into developing countries. It talked about how could future technology play a role in the healthcare sector and also how could design play a role in order to let the healthcare system benefit from the innovative technology.
As a designer, I am thrilled to see that the role of Design has been changed a lot over the last decade. At the very beginning of the Design history, Design only means creating something new or making the plans to be followed by others. Nowadays, I’m proud to say that Design has a power to make some great impacts on different social scales.
But how?
In general, transition role of designer is to mediate between the new technologies and the lifestyles in which those new technologies might be inserted. In the healthcare sector, Transition Design could be very important in the High Tech learning process for all the medical professionals.
For example, these days we talked a lot about medical realities, we assume that in the future the majority of doctors’ work will be accompanied by medical realities. No doubt that these technologies have a tons of advantages in terms of directing the surgery operation and increasing the accuracy of the diagnosis, but we still ignored a serious problem:
How could we train or educate the medical professionals to have the knowledge of using these High Tech? How can we help them to balance their own knowledge and AI? Especially in the developing worlds, even if them receive the machine from the developed countries, they may still don’t have the advanced education level to support them to use these technology appropriately.
And before thinking about what kind of future you want to live in, we should consider what are the future we want to avoid from?
“ To transition means not only having a sense of what you want to transition toward, but also what you are transitioning away from.” (Tonkinwise, C, 2014)
In the healthcare sector, one of the worst scenarios I could image is the conflict between the human(medical professionals’) intelligence and the Health Tech intelligence. So the question is how might we make sure they benefit from each other and supplement for each other?
REFERENCE:
Tonkinwise, Cameron, 2014. Transition Design as Postindustrial Interaction Design? Medium. URL https://medium.com/@camerontw/transition-design-as-postindustrial-interaction-design-6c8668055e8d (accessed 3.6.19).
Program Framework | Carnegie Mellon School of Design [WWW Document], n.d. URL https://design.cmu.edu/content/program-framework (accessed 3.6.19).
