Playing Pretend: Empathy in Design
Gianfranco Zaccai pretends to be a lot of things: Chinese parent, a basketball player, and a child with diabetes to name a few. When asked to work on a healthcare project, Zaccai and his team at Continuum, the design consultancy he co-founded, built a fake hospital room and pretended to be hospital patients. Why? “To empathize,” replied Zaccai in a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Zaccai isn’t interested in producing a “better” healthcare product—his goal is to create a better healthcare experience. Which is exactly what he and Continuum achieved in the Compass modular furniture system for Herman Miller Healthcare. More than 550 clinicians, hospital administrators, architects, and designers were interviewed to find the most important unmet needs in how patient and exam rooms are designed now. The result was a deep understanding of what makes a better experience for everyone involved: the patient, the caregiver, the family, and the administrator. Because, as Zaccai says, “The opportunity for innovation is finding the sweet spot where needs overlap.”
I am loving reading about the use of empathy, healthcare labs, the interviewing patients, care givers, health care professionals. What is amazing is that Herman Miller already has in place the elements being encouraged and regulated via the ADA and Build Codes in the US and in the new AODA in Ontario. Good design when combined with human factors and universal design become excellent and useable design. Cheers to Herman Miller Health Care. JE Sleeth Olga Dosis Optimal Performance Consultants Inc