Design ideas for healthcare

Design thinking makes great innovations by imagining latest approaches to organizational creativity. It does this by designing for value.

Industrial design to design thinking

The Stanford University, catapulted design thinking into the mainstream when they 1^st launched the concept as a formal method taught to engineering students in the year 2005. The organic roots of design thinking go back further and lead us to Harold Van Doren, that wrote the book Industrial Design: A Practical Guide published in 1940. Van Doren described the requirement for industrial parts to lift off the paper and take the form of three-dimensional, not 2-dimensional clay models. He expands by saying, as designers use the clay they gain more experience than designers that depend merely on paper and pencil. Van Doren, of course, is talking about the value of interactions and experiences. A bit comical that the concept was “discovered” a mere 65 years later at Stamford. Van Doren outlined 5 key steps in this procedure he called, an “integrated design program” including:

1. Understand the clay or wax studies (research)


2. Draft a rough dimensioned layout


3. Present the model


4. Full-size dummy ~model or mock-up; prepared by the client from drawings supplied by the designer


5. Full-size working model; prepared by the client and made in metal or other final materials

Various parallels exist between this initial model and the future Stanford design thinking procedure, which will be evident as we cover the Stanford design thinking approach.