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MRes Healthcare & Design (MRes)

Nuzi Barkatally

Nuzi is a healthcare designer and product strategist. She started her career as an experience designer at various advertising agencies, and then dove into the startup world by joining a men's grooming e-commerce company called Dollar Shave Club. While there, she touched every aspect of the customer experience from the website, mobile app, and their physical box design as well as working on many of the internal and customer support tools. She left the company to focus her efforts on her true passion in healthcare, consulting with healthcare startups as well as large healthcare clients and hospitals systems. While in the MRes in Healthcare and Design, she utilized her background in user research, user experience design and product strategy to explore the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in healthcare.Her hope is to be a part of designing the future of healthcare and improving patients’ experience one startup at a time. She is currently the Director of Product for Manatee, a mental health platform for children. 

Contact

moc.cam@izun

futureofhealthcare.com

Degree Details

School of Design

MRes Healthcare & Design (MRes)

"What we value determines what we measure"My work is driven by understanding and supporting the clinician<>patient relationship. My approach is to not only view healthcare challenges within a human-centered design approach, but to also look at problems abstractly, to uncover layers of information, and to understand meaning behind data. I believe we need to always ask oursleves 'why?' Why do we have these challenges in healthcare? Why does the data say this? Why would this be the right solution? 

My proccess during this program took me down many diveregent paths, which ended up being an enlightening process. Had I approached my research in a more systematic way, I don't believe I would have uncovered as much. I allowed myself to go down different paths, to jump off cliffs, and to get lost within confusion. However, this led me to understand new types of connections and relationships within Artificial Intelligence.

I also now believe that discussing ethics is not enough. We need design. Design is the action of ethics. 

Research Questions

Research Process

When I first learned about artificial intelligence and machine learning being used in healthcare, it led me down a rabbit hole of both curiosity and fear. I couldn’t help but have so many questions. How does it work? How can it help? How could it go wrong? I wanted to understand more. However, I quickly realized the more I learned, the less I knew. Trying to get my head around neural networks, black boxes, and data synthesization made for many dizzying nights lost in the myriad of my internet window browser tabs. But I couldn’t get enough.

I started my dissertation by uncovering the ethical implications of AI in healthcare. This led me down several divergent paths. I wondered in what ways could a design lens be applied to AI?

And how could we use design to better understand these implications? The process was like a game of shoots and ladders (or snakes and ladders for the Brits). A few steps forward, then a few steps back. More questions than answers.

How will patients feel when machines make mistakes? If clinicians make decisions based on AI, are they still liable? How does the role of a doctor or clinician change? Will they just end up managing machines?

This research will take you down my journey of learning what I don’t know, and questioning what I learn. No simple answers, but quite a few insights.

The 'Meta' and the 'Tangible'

Mapping the Relationships

Sharing my map

AI can only use what we measure, but what we value determines what we measure. I believe this was the biggest insights I came to. We need evaluate what we value. We need to look at what we measure and what we don’t measure. What values inherently flow into AI, and what gets left out. And not everything can get measured, yet what is not measured is still important. Often it provides the context, the meta. Design is the best way to bring together the meta with the tangible, the qualitative with the quantitative. I love this quote from Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill, “Design produces proof, yes as “cultural invention” it is also comfortable with ambiguity, subjectivity and the qualitative as much as the quantitative. Design is also oriented towards a course of action — it researches and produces systems that can learn from failure, but always with intent.”

Project Raiha - 1st Question

Project Raiha - 2nd Question

Raiha Report

Raiha Report (detail)

Project Raiha is an initiative to provide different tools for teams to create alignment on decisions when developing AI. Its purpose is to create ‘considered AI’. The first tool would be the Raiha Report created by answering a series of questions. Your Raiha Report is like a transparency statement and a doctrine of sorts. It will clearly state how a company’s AI model was created and outline all the decisions that went into creating it. The first iteration would be a simple output of all the answers from the initial set of questions. It could serve as a way to create alignment amongst teams, and allow others to ask questions. However, a future iteration could analyze your answers and point out high areas of risk. Most importantly it could provide design recommendations on how to mitigate those risks.
artificial intelligencecultural implicationsethicsHealthcaresocietal implications

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