Thinking with Design for Global Health’ brings together designers, global health professionals and academics to ask how design can contribute to creative problem solving in global health.
‘Thinking with Design for Global Health’ is relevant to everyone thinking about service improvement in health care.
Hosted by the King’s Centre for Global Health and Health Partnerships, in collaboration with the Health Foundation and the Royal Society of Medicine, it brings together designers, health improvement scientists, global health professionals and academics to ask how design can contribute to creative problem solving in global health.
Human Centred Design with its origins in computer science, engineering and product design adds to and complements traditional strategies for health innovation. It emphasises user-centred definition of health problems; generates tangible prototypes for discussion and testing and iterates constantly with multiple cycles of build/test/learn so that optimisation continues indefinitely
All this has implications for research. For a long time, design and research have been regarded as methodologically and epistemologically separate. But, as doing research has become a recognised part of designing products and services and design activities and artefacts have become recognised as important elements in communicating knowledge, this may change in interesting ways.
In collaboration with the Health Foundation and the Royal Society of Medicine, the King’s Centre for Global Health and Health Partnerships has brought together inspirational: designers (Matt Hunter, formerly Head of Design at the Design Council); researchers (Anette Boaz, Professor of Health Services Research at St George’s, University of London), design academics (Jak Spencer, research lead for global and social at the Royal College of Art); Global Health Practitioners (Simon Berry, ColaLife) and private sector innovators (Remko Vermeulen, VP of product design, Telephonica) to think together on the contribution of design methodology to global (and local) health challenges.
This event asks how design can contribute to creative problem solving in global health. It considers
1. Design processes – what can we learn from the way that designers approach problems and communicate outcomes.
2. Design outcomes – can inclusive design solve global social challenges?
3. Inspiring designs in global health – learning from case studies
If you are interested in finding out more, check out the programme.