The Future of Deeply Human Healthcare
By: Joe Hallock and Jennifer Han
“I truly believe that each of us must find meaning in our work. The best work happens when you know that it’s not just work, but something that will improve other people’s lives.” This was written by Satya Nadella in one of his first letters to Microsoft employees. This same spirit and purpose is at the heart of the annual Microsoft Design Expo: empowering the next generation of designers to improve people’s lives through human-centered design and technology.
Microsoft’s Design Expo is a human-centered design program where universities around the world explore design solutions for complex issues. Over the past 10+ years of the Design Expo program, there have been different types design challenges addressing the many global challenges and ever-evolving technology landscape. The program began as partnership between Microsoft and Apple to integrate technology into the curriculum of design schools worldwide. The goal is to invest in the global Design community, build deeper connections across cultures, and learn together through designing innovative solutions to global challenges. Originally structured as a competition, the Expo has evolved to focus on collaboration. The shift in approach embodies Microsoft’s values of leveraging and contributing to the work of others. We go farther together.
The Design Expo challenge is often aspirational, intentionally open-ended, and centered around a universal mission. Last year’s design challenge is a great example: “How might we design a product, service, or solution that enables empathy at scale?” As Nadella states, “our best work emerges from places of personal passion and meaning.” We want to create space for students to uncover their own sense of purpose and meaning from within the broad landscape of each year’s Design Expo challenge.
This brings us to this year’s challenge: “How might we together create a healthier future for our world?” Ironically, we had written and defined this challenge in the fall of 2019, with no inkling of the global pandemic that would soon unfold. The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has impacted nearly every human being. The impact is revealed through our personal experiences of healthcare and the pivotal role that health, in all its dimensions, plays in our lives. Furthermore, the rise of technology’s intersection with healthcare calls for deeply empathetic and human-centered design thinking. And not just from a homogenous group of designers, but from the multi-faceted global design community.
Diversity ignites empathy. It invites in perspectives that we as individuals may have never considered as a product of our own cultures. A healthcare solution that works in one country may not work on another continent, whether it be from government policies, privacy laws, cultural norms, or pre-existing systems in place today. If we focus only on designing solutions through our home country-centric lenses, we miss the opportunity to empathize and design for global issues at scale. There is tremendous value in diverse voices coming together to tackle a hefty global challenge.
This year’s virtual Design Expo Finals event brought together students and faculty from South Africa, Brazil, Sweden, and the US with Microsoft employees from around the world in a meeting of the minds. The “Design Expo Finals” featured student teams presenting their solutions and design-thinking process, followed by a virtual science fair event for participants and presenters to connect further with students. The fresh ideas and innovative solutions shared by the students demonstrated their thoughtful design decisions, detailed process work, and inspiring ability to think boldly.
Throughout the event, several themes began to emerge. The solutions presented often discussed designing for the role of privacy and protection for the individual. The solutions often leveraged technology as an amplifier of human connection or interaction, not as a replacement. The solutions leveraged empathetic storytelling to showcase the holistic context of the solutions’ experiences, including the complex emotions, thoughts, fears, desires, and triggers of the user’s environments. These themes from the student projects showcase the inspiration and innovation that the next generation of design-thinking leaders will bring.
Fostering relationships between Microsoft, Design programs, and students is at the center of the Design Expo mission. Hosting this event during a pandemic came with new challenges. We were able to connect through our video cameras, leveraged Microsoft Teams chat for feedback and questions, hosted a virtual Science Fair event and a student networking event. We sought ways to leverage our virtual platforms to still create the rich connections and discussions amongst the students and their Design peers. We encouraged new connections across Microsoft divisions through the Expo liaisons, Health Futures team, and the Azure, Dynamics 365, Windows + Devices, and Developer Division design organizations. Although we may not have been together in person, the meeting of our minds, our ideas, and our shared feeling of inspiration thinking as the day wrapped up was just as rewarding.
As we look forward, there is no doubt that the intersection of design and technology will continue to deepen. The need for bold, innovative design thinkers to tackle global challenges will continue to grow. As the pace of technology quickens, the call for us all to create deeply empathetic solutions will only increase. What we love most about the Microsoft Design Expo is its mission, squarely aligned with Microsoft’s mission: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We look forward to the next Microsoft Design Expo and the opportunity to invest in the next generation of design leaders rising up.
Check out all of the projects at https://expo.microsoft.design/.
