6 November 2025
As the field of design for health matures, questions about how best to prepare the next generation of practitioners have become increasingly pressing. Traditional design education, rooted in studio practice and aesthetic considerations, may not fully equip graduates to navigate the complexities of healthcare systems. Meanwhile, health professional education often lacks exposure to creative methodologies that could enhance innovation and patient-centred practice.
The challenge is not simply to add new content to existing curricula, but to rethink how different forms of knowledge and expertise can be brought together. Effective health design requires understanding of clinical contexts, regulatory environments, patient experiences and system dynamics, alongside skills in visualisation, prototyping and collaborative problem-solving.
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14 May 2025
The COVID-19 pandemic forced unprecedented changes across every sector of society, and the design for health community was no exception. Conferences were cancelled, research plans were disrupted, and the urgent demands of the public health response redirected attention and resources. Yet within this disruption, new insights emerged about resilience, adaptation and the potential for design to respond rapidly to changing circumstances.
For many in the field, the pandemic brought into sharp focus questions that had long been discussed in academic terms. How do health systems respond to sudden shocks? What role can design play in crisis communication? How do we maintain community connection when physical gathering becomes impossible?
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9 February 2025
Research from the Urban Institute reveals that four in ten adults with disabilities experience unfair treatment in healthcare settings. More than half of those surveyed reported delays in receiving care due to discrimination. These findings highlight a persistent gap between the principles of inclusive design and the reality of healthcare environments. For architects, designers and healthcare administrators, the challenge is to create spaces that genuinely welcome all patients, regardless of their abilities or circumstances.
Inclusive design in healthcare goes beyond meeting minimum accessibility requirements. While regulations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act establish baseline standards for wheelchair access, doorway widths and signage, truly inclusive environments address a much broader range of human needs.
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8 January 2025
The World Health Organization has published its first evidence-based guidelines on digital health interventions, marking a significant milestone for the global health community. The guidelines provide recommendations on ten ways that countries can use digital technologies, accessible via mobile phones, tablets and computers, to improve health outcomes and strengthen health systems. For researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of design and health, these guidelines offer an important framework for understanding how digital innovations can be deployed responsibly and effectively.
The guidelines address a range of digital health interventions, from telemedicine services that allow patients in remote areas to access care, to decision support tools that help healthcare workers make better clinical choices.
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15 September 2024
The application of design thinking to healthcare has moved from experimental pilot projects to a rapidly expanding field of research and practice. A comprehensive systematic review published by the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion examined how design thinking methodologies have been applied across diverse healthcare settings and conditions, finding that interventions developed using this approach consistently outperformed traditionally developed alternatives in terms of user satisfaction, usability and effectiveness.
Design thinking, at its core, is a human-centred problem-solving methodology that emphasises empathy, iterative prototyping and collaborative ideation. In healthcare contexts, this translates to deeply understanding the experiences of patients, families and clinical staff before developing solutions.
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