Five suggestions on how we can improve the way we Design for Health and how we communicate about it..

Now that we have experienced a major global pandemic the interest of design researchers and practitioners on health has grown exponentially. This was also evident in the number of presentations and papers during the DRS2020 Conference at Bilbao in the last week of June 2022.

?However, if we are to improve the way we design for health and position ourselves strategically in leading projects in health we need to take a good stock of our current practices and change some of our old ways.

?Following discussions with design practitioners and researchers as well as my own experience in leading design for health projects and sitting in assessment panels that award funding I offer the following five key suggestions and reflections:

1.????More evidence-based design research: if designers are to play the leading role that we have seen they can do, there are some imperatives to address. One of them is how do we provide the evidence of the impact of design, and how do we influence the relevant policy sectors. Although evidence-based design is gaining ground it is still not employed by most designers. When it comes to research in health we need to be capturing and comparing data right from the start. Evaluating a designed intervention at the end has limited value without an established baseline from the outset. Gathering qualitative or quantitative evidence robustly will make it much easier to engage with key stakeholders and influence policies too.

2.????Focus on prevention rather than treatment: If we do today what we did yesterday we will end up with the same results. We know that the cost of healthcare delivery is increasing. We know that we have an increasing and ageing population. The issue is how to reduce the cost and burden of disease, particularly of non-communicable disease, by focusing more research work around prevention and looking at how design can work in prevention. The majority of design research on health is currently focused on care and treatment. Although this is still an important area, unless we shift attention to design with prevention in mind we will end up with very similar outcomes. A question each designer should ask themselves is: does my product, service, intervention, action help prevent ill-health and promote wellbeing??

3.????Linking Human and Planetary Health: isolated actions are not enough and looking at human health separately from that of our planet or vice versa falls short of tackling the real issues. The field of health needs to be expanded to include issues related to the management of the planet's natural system, such as how we produce energy, how our food is sourced, how we build our cities, how we develop our services and how we protect marine and terrestrial biodiversity.

4.????Publish on indexed conferences and journals. As relatively new discipline we need to learn from each other bit also ensure that we do not replicate work, reinventing the wheel each time and failing to reflect and learn frost past mistakes as well as good examples.?We can only do this by ensuring our research is searchable and discoverable by other researchers. This is how we will avoid replicating the same research, be able to compare research across different geographies and very importantly promote the value of design research beyond our own discipline.

5.????Speak to the unconverted: as with most disciplines we predominantly tend to present our work to other design researchers and practitioners. Although a conversation amongst us is good in terms of sharing best practices and learning from each other, if we are to promote our work beyond ourselves we need different strategies. Next time you plan to attend an event, conference or workshop try to go for one outside of your discipline. You will be amazed how receptive others would be to ideas we take for granted but also what you will learn from engaging with researchers in health and other fields.

I would be very much interested to hear your thoughts and additional suggestions.