I have been following the opinions on the choice of the word design. I Indy own work and writing I found Simon’s conception of design rather limited to improving existing conditions.



I just want to add that defining design stays entirely in the domain of writing and speaking. If you want to make a difference, it has to be practiced accordingly and instituted in educational programs and degrees earned and widely accepted.  A definition sticks around only as long as it is repeated.



The reason I am adding my 5 cents to the discussion is mainly because I just saw the article on designing in the domain of health care.



https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/06/design-thinking-as-a-way-to-improve-patient-experience.html



Klaus





Design thinking as a way to improve patient experience

Students in a two-day course offered by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford looked for ways to improve the patient experience in the Stanford emergency department.

Jun 3 2016

[Woman and man in an emergency-room simulation]



Stan Nowak, PhD, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, typically spends his days using X-ray spectroscopy to understand the chemical and electronic properties of matter. But on a recent Saturday afternoon, he played the role of the estranged father of a fictional young woman brought into a simulated version of Stanford Hospital<http://stanfordhospital.org/>’s emergency department after an automobile accident.



The patient — actually a high-tech mannequin voiced by a woman in a nearby control room — was conscious on a gurney. “Oh, it hurts,” she said. “Ow, that really hurts!”



Ten genuine Stanford doctors, nurses and technicians provided simulated care to simulated patients.



The exercise was part of a two-day course in design thinking offered by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford<http://dschool.stanford.edu>, known informally as the d.school. Nowak was among the 14 students in the class. Their goal was go find ways to improve the patient experience in the hospital’s emergency department. For the exercise, they played patients and their family members to get a sense of what it actually feels like to be in the often-chaotic atmosphere of an emergency department.



Empathy is a key element of design thinking, a step-by-step approach to problem-solving that involves observing and interviewing people as they go through an experience, and then using that information to prototype and test ways of improving the product or process.



For example, before building a better toothbrush, a product designer would go into people’s homes, watch them brush their teeth and ask them about the experience.



The emergency room experience



Design thinking “is a way for health care to make changes by empathizing with our patients and their families,” said Alpa Vyas, Stanford Health Care vice president for patient experience. “We want to know what their unmet needs are. Our patients have told us they want us to know them and to understand them. Applying design thinking to health care is an invaluable way for us to do that.”



The class’s focus was on care in the emergency room — not the medicine, but the experience. Design thinking’s process, which begins by asking people how they feel, is a good way to get to that type of information. “We know that if we control pain and take care of the medical emergency quickly, we are doing our job,” said one of the class’s teachers, Alexei Wagner<https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/alexei-wagner>, MD, MBA, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine, visiting lecturer at the d.school and assistant medical director of the Department of Emergency Medicine<http://med.stanford.edu/emed.html>. “We wanted to know what else we could do.”



Stanford junior Kinjal Vasavada, one of the class’s 14 students, developed a new appreciation for how change could evolve in medicine. She had participated in other d.school classes, but she said that until she entered this one, she wasn’t sure if she could find opportunities to apply design thinking to medicine, but “this class proved me totally wrong.”





Sent from my iPhone





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