Projects
InnovationSpace students explore healing environments with design giant Herman Miller
For students learning the art of product development in ASU’s InnovationSpace program, working with a sponsor such as Herman Miller is a little like winning the design lottery. The global leader boasts a string of classic interior furnishings, the kind that command floor space at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and grace the pages of design history books.
But substance—not just style—is key to Herman Miller’s success. One of the company’s best sellers—the Aeron office chair—for example, represented years of research and collaboration among engineers, ergonomists, orthopedic specialists, physical therapists and designers. Before it hit the market, hundreds of ordinary people had taken the chair for a test drive, rating it for comfort and usability.
It’s the kind of nitty-gritty, roll-up-your-sleeves research that InnovationSpace students can relate to. “Herman Miller’s approach is very familiar to us,” observes senior industrial design student Erik Hernandez. “We try to discover what the user’s needs are first and then design for that.”
Hernandez is a member of Merge, one of three InnovationSpace teams sponsored by Herman Miller for the 2006-7 academic year. Their assignment is to develop product concepts for acute and ambulatory care environments.
But instead of rushing pen to paper, students have spent half of the first semester of InnovationSpace’s two-semester class conducting research. Hernandez and his team, for example, have compiled a whopping 300-page binder that includes information on everything from competitors’ products and new healthcare technologies to the incidence of on-the-job injuries for nurses and price points for existing healthcare products.
Then the students headed out into the field in search of what are known as product opportunity gaps (POGs). Using such tools as rapid ethnography, the students interviewed potential users and experts as well as observed people interacting with objects in their everyday environments. The multidisciplinary nature of InnovationSpace teams, which comprise students from industrial design, visual communication design, business and engineering, ensures that information will be gathered from as many viewpoints as possible. This layering of perspectives helps make the final products more functional, desirable and marketable.
The Merge team, for example, arranged for exhaustive tours of Desert Samaritan hospital and the new Banner Estrella Medical Center in Glendale, ranked as one of the top ten most technologically advanced hospitals in the nation. Other teams, such as the group known as Sum, visited walk-in clinics in Mesa and on the ASU campus.
The students interviewed nurses and watched them stock supplies or answer patient calls for attention. They lingered in waiting rooms, toured operating theaters and hung out around nurses’ stations. Through sketches and scribbled notes, they recorded their observations.
No detail was too small or mundane. Industrial design senior
Sarah Johnson, a member of Sum, was especially alert to makeshift modifications in the workplace. “It’s a big red flag,” she says, that can tip students off to bad design or overlooked design opportunities. Supply carts in one clinic, for example, had no system for prioritizing commonly used items. As a result, she says, vials of smelling salts were crudely taped to cart exteriors to keep them handy for fainting patients.
Even technologically sophisticated environments such as Banner Estrella could have benefited from a more holistic design scrutiny. The Merge team, for example, noted that planners had incorporated strategies for easing the workload of nurses. But despite the fact that nurses were given time-saving devices such as portable computers for electronic charting, for example, many of them still preferred paper, returning to work stations to type up their notes. “It was obvious that no one asked the nurses what they wanted,” Hernandez observes.
In some instances, gains in efficiency were eroded by small oversights that could easily be remedied through more thoughtful design. The Merge team, for example, noticed that remote television controls in hospital rooms often were lost, stolen or placed out of reach of patients, prompting them to push their bedside call buttons for help. Playing hide and seek with remote controls routinely diverted nurses’ attention from more important tasks.
Students also brainstormed their own hospital experiences to better identify POGs. Johnson’s fellow team member, business student Jim Jeffers, recalls once standing for hours in a hospital emergency room with a dislocated shoulder because he could not find a comfortable position in the hospital’s rigidly ordered furniture. In response, Johnson came up with an idea for modular furniture shaped like living cells that could be reconfigured for a variety of patient needs.
Johnson identified another common complaint: boredom. Noting that people visiting hospitalized patients often are stumped for interesting bedside conversation, she proposed a multimedia kiosk that might supply everything from absorbing games to information about how the room’s medical equipment functions. And citing research showing that patient anxiety spikes in waiting rooms, she explored nerve-calming devices such as glass walls that enclose ant farms, exotic plants or cascading water.
Next semester, students will make the tough choice of focusing on a single product idea. By semester’s end, they will have conducted exhaustive user research and developed detailed designs, marketing analyses, engineering feasibility studies and communications strategies. In May, their final projects will be on display in a public exhibition at the College of Design. With any luck, their designs someday may come to a hospital or clinic near you.
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