Iii.
Design is an essential layer in most endeavors that aim to improve health, though far too often there is a failure to plan for, finance, and deploy design solutions.
Dave C. Frankel
questions
Design is an essential layer in most endeavors that aim to improve health, though far too often there is a failure to plan for, finance, and deploy design solutions. Design today is such a sprawling set of activities that we are first motivated to define and create an intelligible framework for the connected activities of architecture, environmental design, industrial design, graphic and digital product design, and apparel design, especially in relation to health. In doing so, we aim to make the integration of design less daunting.
We also must embrace an understanding that this framework will evolve both rapidly and perpetually with the continued development of artificial intelligence, including:
- The underlying technological / scientific advances in AI, and
- The products downstream of these technical advances.
In addition to creating a framework of health-related design activities and technological advancement, we are motivated to build a framework of relevant governmental and non-governmental structures (people, workflows, laws & regulations, etc.) and a strategy for integration with these structures, for effective development and implementation of design solutions.
Finally, we are motivated to explore novel approaches to bridging design capabilities and solutions. This involves orienting designers to problems in health that may be beyond their purview, connecting designers to those outside design working to understand and solve these problems, facilitating connection between designers (an architect to a graphic designer, an industrial designer to a digital product designer, and so on), and exploring novel approaches to the finance of design in the service of better health.
Open questions related to design and health include:
- How should we think about proactive versus reactive design solutions to problems in health? For example, why might an architect work on a solution to temporary housing in the wake of a natural disaster or climate displacement versus working on housing that is more resilient in the first place?
- What AI tools are most relevant to design practice today? Of these, which are design tools specifically, and which are more general tools that can be connected to design processes? What are some of the most compelling ideas for where these tools are headed and what it means for how design practice will evolve?
- What are some of the more novel, under-explored avenues of funding for design solutions to problems in health? For example, are there potential roles for crowdfunding or cryptocurrencies?
- To what extent can new technology help with cost reduction strategies for design solutions?
- Where and how can cost-reducing strategies be advocated for and implemented in order to create money for design? What if in Chicago for example, instead of spending $1.1 million to build each unit of affordable housing, this was reduced to $400,000, and thus created additional budget for the design of a host of other community and health-building innovations?
- How do we build awareness and understanding of the potential value of design in improving health among politicians, business leaders, and leaders of non-profits and N.G.O.s? What is the optimal design of companies and institutions to support this?
- How do we think about designing and building minimum-viable-products and recursive feedback loops in the service of better?
1
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. 2023.
2
Scientific Background on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2018. ECONOMIC GROWTH, TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE, AND CLIMATE CHANGE. The Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
bibliography
BOOKS
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Lawrence Lessig / Basic Books / 1999
“In [cyberspace], code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.”
Peter Baldwin / The MIT Press / 2023
“Why and how scholarly knowledge should be free for all.”
ARTICLES
Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us
Bill Joy / Wired / April 2000
“The 21st-century technologies—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR)—are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
Joanna Kempner et al / Science / 2005
“Forbidden knowledge embodies the idea that there are things that we should not know.”
Rhea Purohit / Asimov Press / 2024
“The Supreme Court case that built the biotechnology industry.”
Open Biotechnology:
Licenses Needed
Yann Joly / Nature Biotech / 2010
“Open biotechnology may be the ideal solution to ensure scientific progress and the realization of the common good, but it has yet to deliver on its promises.”
Closing the Access Gap for Health Innovations:
An Open Licensing Proposal for Universities
Samantha Chaifetz et al / Globalization and Health / 2007
“Forbidden knowledge embodies the idea that there are things that we should not know.”
PAPERS
How the FDA Impedes Innovation:
A Case Study in Overregulation
Michael Mandel / Progressive Policy Institute / 2011
“Is the FDA unintentionally choking off cost-saving medical innovation?”
Assessing the FDA via the Anomaly of Off-Label Drug Prescribing
Alexander T. Tabarrok / The Independent Review / 2000
“The implications of off-label uses of pharmaceuticals for the FDA’s regulatory power over new drugs.”
Kevin E. Davis / NYU Law Review / 2013
“This Article analyzes innovations in contractual documents using the same kind of framework that is used to analyze other kinds of technological innovation.”
Joe Fore Jr. et al. / Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration / 2006
“Given its essential role in the world of molecular biology and its commercial success, [PCR] technology can serve as a case study for evaluating the effects of patenting biological research tools on biomedical research.”
Contract Theory and the Limits of Contract Law
Alan Schwartz & Robert E. Scott / Yale Law Journal / 2003
An Introduction to the Law & Economics of Information
Tim Wu / Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 482. / 2016
“[This] review questions if the public good concept, while well-established, ought really be the exclusive focus of the economic and legal understanding of information.”
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