Healthcare is one of the biggest issues facing North America right now–regardless on where you fall on the political spectrum health care (I’m Canadian, so it’s no real secret where I fall..) it is one of the few things we can TRULY say is a matter of life and death. What about designing a better healthcare experience? This is a massive question that designers and healthcare professionals around the world are attempting to address, and by no means will even come close to answering here, but I hope to at least get you thinking on it…

A great post from Frog Design started with this note from Florence Nightingale:

“It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly as plants always make their way towards the light; a patient will even complain that it gives him pain ‘lying on that side.’ ‘Then why do you lie on that side?’ He does not know — but we do. It is because it is the side towards the window.”

Healing begins and ends with a human experience. It’s something that rarely gets the attention it should. Whenever you enter a hospital-regardless of how “good” it is-it can be mind boggling how cold and as a result, downright frightening, the experience can be. But it doesn’t have to be. We know so much about designing better tools, better technology, better experiences, it’s about time we all start thinking about how to make the patient experience just a bit better.

Evidence Based Design is a term that’s incredibly important to this sector and essentially boils down to having any innovation be subject to a process as stringent as a clinical trial. Which makes some mind-boggling design innovation just a bit slower…but it’s not impossible.

Now I’m not talking about a Frank Gehry monument, it’s about using technology to design better experiences. London designers Priestmangoode propose hospital wards modeled on health spas and beds like those in first class airline cabins. It’s an interesting experiment, and in the least it gets you thinking about the future and what it may look like.  They have a compiled a great manifesto on health to get you thinking more about the impact of design on health care (here). It would be so amazing to see technology and design find that perfect intersection for the world of health care. And maybe, just maybe we can get a health care bill passed to boot (sorry, political undertones…)

Images via Deezen