CS DAWS (OPPOSITE PAGE). Through a partnership between Emily Carr and
Providence Health Care, industrial design students Jeremy Calhoun and Daryl

Agawin designed and prototyped a more flexible ambulatory cart.

STAY SAFE. Emily Carr was approached by Vancouver Coastal Health to help
improve lift use in Residential Care facilities to avoid workplace injuries. Commu-
nication design students Daisy Aylott, Craig Fleisch and Lan Yan came together to

create this visual information system.

Lp @
BACK ARMS «
CALVES

let’s begin

SHARING

OUR KNOWLEDGE

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WE’VE BECOME DESIGNERS OF
STRATEGY AND PROCESS, ENABLING
THESE PARTICIPANTS TO BECOME
DESIGNERS THEMSELVES. IT ENDS
UP WITH A MUCH RICHER, MORE
ROUNDED SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM.

WL

And as director for this virtual laboratory, what are the themes or
issues that the lab will likely encounter in the next couple of years?

The direction that I’d like to take is into a more transdisciplinary under-
standing of how design can relate to a large complex problem. Tradi-
tionally when you talk of designing for health, we’re typically talking
products or assistive devices, objects that can help a person physically,
and that will continue to be a big part of what health design is. But more
importantly, we're looking at a broader view of what design can bring,
which means that some outcomes may be communication design, inter-
action design, industrial design and almost always a blend of all three.
Systems design plays an important part; we can’t start instituting any
kind of change without changing things at a structural level. A project
last year was about this really interesting space where nurses coming

on shift don’t overlap with nurses going off shift, they communicate on
the fly and impromptu, and there’s no structure for it. They came to us
looking for how we could facilitate that exchange of information. Many
of the projects ended up being apps for an iPad where crucial informa-
tion would float to the top so that things they needed to be most aware
of are front and centre, while other students looked at it from an edu-
cational point of view, recommending changing the way this is taught at
nursing school as a change to the curriculum.

Emily Carr is moving towards a new campus on Great Northern Way.
Can you project into that space and imagine the Health Design Lab
what you see?

Absolutely, | would love to have space. In this location, we’re always
fighting for space. It would be wonderful to have even a studio space
where people can come and go and share ideas and work together. It
would also be really interesting to have some kind of flexible proto-
typing space where we could mock up a room and then test how an
ambulatory cart might come in and out of that room and what special
considerations there are. And I’ve heard that from partners as well,
architectural partners, healthcare partners — they would love to be able
to test out some of these ideas in real space.

Interviewed by Deborah Shackleton

SOCIABILITY

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