October 19, 2011 | Read Time: 1 minute
Intrigued by last week’s post about IDEO using design thinking to fight poverty? Then you might want to check out this provocative essay on The Atlantic’s Web site:
When design focuses on understanding the needs and desires of customers, it has the potential to improve health care–and maybe even medical research, says David A. Shaywitz, co-founder of a the Pasteur Project at Harvard Medical School. The project focuses on improving ways to help patients.
Dr. Shaywitz writes: “Medicine has spent a lot of effort focused on a physician’s idea of a patient, rather than developing a more nuanced view of life from the perspective of the patients themselves.”
What do you think? Are there other fields that could benefit from design’s focus on understanding the lives of clients?
