At midterm we took you to the Congo and gave you malaria," Roel Punzalan, a 26 year-old product design student from the Philippines said as the lights went down in a funky concrete studio on the edge of the Art Center College of Design's Pasadena [Calif.] campus. "Now, hopefully, we'll cure it."
Punzalan was joking, of course. His presentation was one of several that students of the well-known design school nestled in the hills near Los Angeles gave to corporate customers including BMW, Honda, and Nestle on Dec. 7. Art Center calls it Super Thursday, the day when, after a semester of working on a corporate assignment, students deliver their ideas. Art Center has been working with corporate clients almost since its founding in 1930, and design schools around the world engage in similar projects.
It's a first, however, for General Electric's health-care unit, which sells $15 billion a year worth of clunky X-ray machines, CAT-scan machines, and ultrasound testing equipment. The health-care division has long been a technology innovator. But it has historically tried to differentiate its products by getting better and faster readings from its instruments -- "feeds and speeds" as Lou Lenzi, the general manager of global design at GE Healthcare, puts it. So turning to art school students for ideas is a significant departure.
Good for Patients and Profits
But to compete now, the company believes that it has to offer more than just better technology. GE wants to make medical tests easier on both the patients and the operators of the equipment, which means focusing on the human side of the equation, from ergonomics to emotions. How, for instance, could a traditionally monstrous CAT scan machine be designed to seem less ominous to patients already distressed by their medical condition? How could a machine be easier for the technician to use?
In addition to the primary human-centered goals, such design improvements should translate into more accurate readings and a leg up on rival manufacturers. "All of our competitors have similar technology," admits Lawrence Murphy, the health-care unit's chief designer. "We're looking beyond the hardware. We're looking at the patient's journey."
GE Healthcare's participation in the student project came out of a meeting of its two-year-old design council, a group of design bigwigs from various GE business units who convene quarterly to share ideas. When the health-care unit's representative on the design council, Douglas Dietz, heard that corporate dollars were being made available to fund a student project, he jumped at the opportunity.
Improved Experience
There were other forces at work, too. One of GE Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt's initiatives has been to call on employees to "Go Big" by targeting large markets and ideas that might pay off in outsized ways. With that in mind, the health-care designers asked the Art Center students to look at how the company's services might be delivered in developing nations 20 years from now.
Art Center fielded three teams of roughly eight students each that spent the semester studying both existing and emerging health needs in Africa. The students came up with some winners, such as an ultrasound machine that wrapped like a blanket around a woman's stomach. The design alleviated the need for the messy gel that, in current tests, is smeared over the mother's stomach -- an improvement to the patient experience.
More important, it reduced the training required for technicians. Current machines depend on a skilled technician to guide a probe over the stomach. In contrast, the multiple imaging sensors woven into the blanket meant that the device simply had to be correctly placed, a big advantage in countries in which technicians are in short supply.
Considering the Culture
Another student concept was a non-invasive malaria test, a scanner that could detect disease by looking through the skin of a patient's hand. Malaria is currently diagnosed with a needle prick and a blood test, something that scares some patients away and can delay treatment until results come back. Like many of the student products, the scanner was painted in earthy African colors so as to seem less foreign, and had wicker handles similar to those of countless tools used in rural villages. That also appealed to the GE folk. "If a patient relaxes you get a better scan," Murphy said. "There's a huge domino effect in terms of productivity."
Some of the student ideas were surprisingly simple, such as allowing African villagers to personalize their mosquito netting by dyeing it with colored insect repellent from a flower-like dispenser. "Rates of malaria dropped 80% in villages that used bed nets," explained Eric Burns, a 26-year-old product design student from Natchez, Miss. "Why are we giving them a white net, a product we designed? If it's designed by the user, they're learning about this and they're having fun."
The young designers also took great care to integrate African languages and customs into their products. A radio bracelet that could alert a midwife if a pregnant woman in her care was having trouble, was modeled on African jewelry and was decorated with indentations that resembled the ritual scarification some African mothers participate in. The product was called Akuaba -- which means fertility in a Nigerian dialect.
The Art of Problem-Solving
Other ideas seemed more out of Jules Verne -- a dirigible that could transport mothers-to-be who developed complications from remote regions to an acute care hospital. That idea won praise for addressing a major problem in developing countries, the lack of infrastructure. It also resonated with the GE folk because it involved several of the company's other business lines. "Would GE make it? Probably not," Murphy said, though he added, "but we do make aircraft propulsion systems and plastics and power generators."
The dirigible also illustrates how design school students are being taught to take a systems approach to problem-solving. The idea is that you don't tackle high maternal mortality rates solely by designing better diagnostic equipment -- you also find a faster and environmentally-friendly way to get the patient to a place she can get care. To foster that holistic approach, each Art Center team included students from product, transportation, and environmental design. "Design is changing from surface modeling and pretty images to products that have a physical and emotional outcome," explained David Mocarski, the chairman of the environmental design department at Art Center.
Beyond Vanilla
Companies typically pay around $100,000 to sponsor a semester-long course. Art Center staff members admit that the businesses aren't likely to walk away with products they can immediately put to market. The GE representatives said they had multiple goals. For one, it gets design students excited about an industry in which they might not otherwise think of working -- and that seemed to happen. "I would say this is the best class I've had," said Katherine Dill, a 25 year-old product student from Chappaqua, N.Y.
These projects also open the eyes and minds of the corporate team. They reminded the GE designers of the value of human-centered design. And even the wildly impractical design concepts served a purpose, by living up to Immelt's missive to "Go Big," and encouraging the GE team to reconsider what their work could be -- waste-disposal vehicles shaped like elephants, water-borne clinics powered by tidal waves, probes that test for parasites in water and shoot out red warning flags that double as larva traps.
"We like to think we're young and hip, but most of our products look like this," said GE design exec Dietz as he tapped a plain white coffee mug at a luncheon following the student presentations. "White enamel, with maybe a little silver on top."
Copyright 2006 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment