Published paper in the Australiasian Medical Journal, Nov 2009

Last month, the Australiasian Medical Journal (AMJ) published a 4-part series special issue on design and health.

Image from the AMJ website

Editors of the journal, Moyez Jiwa and Christopher Kueh, write in their Editorial titled, 'Designing the Future in Health':

The design of the structures in which we work, rest and play serve the health agenda by ensuring that all who use those facilities, irrespective of their physical or cognitive capacity are able to contribute to society. Designers also claim that human emotion is a very significant confounding variable in design for health. Therefore authors in this special edition of the AMJ suggest that the aesthetic qualities of the objects and symbols around us, indeed the very clothes our healers choose to wear, have a significant impact on our experiences and ultimately on the speed of recovery when we are ill [...] We seek to foster the debate which will ultimately change the way we craft solutions to global health care problems from dementia to deafness, from the packaging of medicines to how we find our way around hospitals, from tools to measure the severity of pain to the design of websites to promote self help.

I am pleased to announce that Deborah Szebeko (Founder and Director of thinkpublic) and I had our paper on the Dott 07 project, Alzheimer 100, published in the 3rd of the 4-part series.

We worked on this paper for many months earlier this year. Our intent was to give insight into the Alzheimer 100 project and the co-design practices of thinkpublic. The paper is titled, 'Co-designing for dementia: The Alzheimer 100 project' and if you click on the title, it will automatically download a pdf of our paper. Otherwise, visit the AMJ website where our paper sits alongside other design and health papers in Volume 1, No. 12, Design and Health III.

If you get a chance to read our paper, please let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback (positive and/or critical) as we'd love to hear from you!

I feel really honoured that we had the opportunity be part of the journal's initial design and health conversation. I'm excited to see where the AMJ goes from here in discussing and debating design and health, contributing valuable stories, insights and lessons for the future of healthcare and livelihoods of everyone in society.

Banks 'breaking all the rules' in bushfire (Sydney Morning Herald)

It is heartbreaking to watch the online news about the Australian bush fires in the state of Victoria. Before moving to the UK, we traveled through country Victoria. One of our favourite places was the country town of Marysville.


Marysville was a small country town, just outside the Yarra Valley wine region, surrounded by beautiful dense natural bushland and waterfalls.


On Sunday morning, we learned the township was completely destroyed by the fires. We read this news in disbelief. It's hard to comprehend that a place we visited, very much enjoyed and hoped to return to one day, doesn't exist anymore.

Many fires are still burning in the state of Victoria, and the financial cost is escalating. In the news today, an Australian bank went to press about what they are doing to help. In response to the emergency situation, they are "breaking the rules" to set up temporary bank locations in townships destroyed by the fires as locals won't leave, fearing they may not be allowed to enter again:

"What the team did, breaking all the rules, is shove some money in a cash box, take some scraps of paper for deposit slips and then set up in the local library. It normally takes us six months to open a branch and they did it in 30 minutes."

What great empathy. What great service. And I think this just goes to show- if a large organisation really wants to do something- anything for their customers, they can.

Service Design in M. Design at UTS, Australia

Sometimes it's funny to be led right back to where one started.

I completed my undergraduate design degree at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia and just discovered they have added new majors to their Master of Design Degree, inclusive of Service Design. Here's what it says:

Service Design

The future of business is the delivery of customised experiences. This future depends upon design, on the expert ability to visualise and plan interactions. This specialisation puts designers in the driving seat of a major economic shift now underway. It shows designers how to shift from product development to service innovation through techniques like experience notation, service blueprinting and touchpoint management. This is the first service design degree program in Australia.