The Service Design Fringe Festival London was a schedule of events that ran alongside the main London Design festival over 10 days, including excellent events covering the underlying need for service design and giving insights into the skills needed to conduct service design projects. PDR saw the opportunity to organise an event in our new London office that shared some of our experience and encouraged discussion on a specific subject area, with an aim of making it really valuable for attendees.
Medical and Healthcare is a field where PDR has a wide range of expertise, including the design of consumables, complex interactive medical devices, consumer health products, wearables and surgical implants.
Bringing a team that works across these areas meant we could go into detail, talking about specific obstacles and ways of overcoming them, which we then used as reference points for other possible difficulties.
Personally I work on designing, prototyping and testing interactive products, applications and services and have experienced the challenges of seeking to use technology to improve healthcare provision first hand.
For the event, each colleague from PDR shared their own experiences of how technology is impacting their work in healthcare at present and also posed a What if? Question to highlight a potential opportunity or challenge that had captured their interest. Watch the video in full (The sounds not great!) to hear all the points discussed in detail but I’ve tried to cover in brief the points that stood out to me:
Paul, PDR’s Head of Innovation kicked the afternoon off, introducing the situation as he sees it after having worked in service design in and around healthcare for over 10 years. Specifically Paul raised the need to move the discussion on Service Design on, suggesting that uptake has not kept pace with the promise of service design as it has grown in recognition over recent years.
“We are currently living with a Technology Disabled Health Care System”
Ben, Senior Design Consultant at PDR, shared the trends that he has seen over the recent years and particularly the ones that he is seeing impact upon his work in the design of physical medical devices.
“I’m excited about where the increased investment in healthcare from Tech Giants might take the industry”
Ben was particularly interested in the implications of current progress for medical device manufacturers, identifying how the new wave of devices and investment across the globe will inform future developments.
This informed his discussion question: What if... tech giants diverted their investments in autonomous vehicles to autonomous healthcare, what results would we see and how soon would we see them?