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Healthcare and Wellness

Now is an exciting time to be a designer in healthcare. The industry watched the boom in the design of consumer and technical products, both physical and virtual, and a decade or so later has finally woken up to the power of design to improve many aspects of healthcare and wellness. For instance, wicked problems like patients better self-managing their chronic diseases are better tackled with products that embrace many disciplines unified by design.
Behavioural psychology, digital health, technical innovation (AI, AR), and service design laid on top of medical, pharmaceutical, and scientific evidence-based approaches, are more likely to significantly impact outcomes and quality of life. The skills nurtured in an arts-based design environment tend to look more holistically for solutions that also include the less technical aspects of what will make a product or service actually work in the real world.
Solutions often have to deal with such complex trade-offs that designers who learn to empathise with users, patients, family members and healthcare professionals will be better able to be the midwives between the technical and human aspects to engage and delight their users and stakeholders. These students’ work demonstrates many different ways design can be an amplifier for better health and wellness around the globe.

Bill Evans

Bill Evans

Bill's career has focused on the user-centred design of medical products, founding consultancy Bridge Design in San Francisco in 1992 working with global clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500, garnering multiple industry design awards.
As well as diagnostic and therapeutic devices his work also pioneered in digital health. He speaks and writes for industry events/media. He has been a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Royal College of Art, and Imperial College. He chaired the IDSA National Medical Conference in 2016 Bill is an early graduate of the RCA/Imperial MDes in Industrial Design Engineering where
the arts-based and more human-centric creative environment enhanced the engineering education he brought. This combination was ideally suited to the design of complex medical systems where human issues join the scientific and technical challenges.
He works as an occasional professional photographer specializing in performers and won a Burning Man Honoraria Grant for a fire sculpture 'Camera Lucida' which was shown there in 2018.
Having sold Bridge in 2015, he now teaches more, provides medtech/digital health product innovation consulting, and also advice to Creative Services Firms on running the business side of their operations through his firm Bolster Advisors.

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