From Designer to Healthcare Startup, BodyFarm Lab Makes the Organs Alive
A healthy body is our wealthiest asset. We build our goals and ideas on this solid foundation. We work hard and our body supports our greatest motivation. Yet how little do we know about this inseparable character in our journey of life? How often do we stop to listen to what she has to tell us? How often do we wait until we receive this warning message to realize that we have been inattentive to her?
Opportunities in the Ordinary Life
Yung-ching Wang , cofounder of BodyFarm Lab said, “As a full-time designer , workload sometimes is overwhelming.” He used to stay up late just to make little progress of a case. With the increasing workload, his physical condition has become worse and didn’t seem to stop.
“ I wanted to find out the reasons. I wanted to see if I could do anything just to make myself feel a bit better. I was worried, yet at the same time, worries are too luxurious for my tight schedule.”
Due to those crazy working hours and limited knowledge of resources, he didn’t know where to start from and what the road map might be like.
“Our organs have been working with us for so many years, but we are always so helpless whenever there are some issues going on.”
Such problems had plagued him and his friends in the industry for a long time, but he had no ideal solution. Fortunately, they took part in the H. Spectrum Program organized by YongLin Healthcare Foundation. He met many friends having similar concepts but different professions — some with a western medicine background, some with Chinese medicine background, and some of them were like Yong-ching Wang who was familiar with art and design.
Inspiring people from all over the country came together, set some opportunities and adventures, hoping to light up a broader vision and work out a solution to the annoyance in life, and this is how the Body Farm Lab team was born.
Create Vivid Content by Adding Game Components
Medical knowledge is relatively hard and cold to most non-medical professionals. Many people also set higher thresholds and are less willing to learn them. The team wants to create a more relaxed and less burdensome interface and environment for product users, and therefore they decide to adopt a strategy that combined with the game.
Because the organs in the body cannot be directly observed with the naked eye, most people’s understanding of the organs may remain on the plane schematic diagram. The team hopes to visualize and anthropomorphize the organs so that users can have deeper interaction with the organs.
“I remember there was a very popular game called “Happy Farm”. At that time, people would remember to harvest and water regularly. And, to a certain extent, I think that running a body is somehow similar to running a farm. We have to irrigate regularly, since “running our body is a long-term project.”
The team uses the Five Elements from Chinese traditional philosophy (Wu Xing): metal, wood, fire, water and earth, to give each organ its own personality and expression, and hopes that users can establish emotional links with their own organs while irrigating this “body farm”. Body Farm Lab also offers personalized settings to enable users to to have their Body Farm closest to their real body’s conditions.
Cooperation Across Different Expertise
Yung-ching Wang said that this is his first time participating in healthcare startup practice. In addition to knowing like-minded entrepreneurial partners, he also learned a great deal of medical knowledge and clarified the “outsiders” imagination of medical treatment.
“It was originally just about “knowing what happens with our body,” but not necessarily “knowing why so”.
However, in order to design the Body Farm Lab that best fits the real human body, the team must follow the basics and gain an in-depth understanding of the body’s important messages. “People who came to H. Spectrum were all passionate about healthcare and are trying their best to exploit their talents.”
He points out that, as a designer himself, his strength lies in marketing and improving the visual quality; once the visual quality is improved, the degree of attention will more likely to rise. Body Farm Lab is the team with the highest frequency of attention in TRANS 2017. Wang said that in fact, the team had been working overtime in order to present the best Body Farm Lab to people.
Looking back on how far they have achieved, Wang gave a short comment:
“I’m always happy in the process. I was just the at the right place, the right time, with the right people”.
Author: Sarah Wang
Reviser: Jeffrey Wu, Ariel Cho
