Health Design Thinking : Creating Products and Services for Better Health

A Fast Company “Most Important Books for Designers to Read Right Now”

Discover how the principles of human-centered design can be applied to real-world health challenges in dozens of illustrated examples—from drug packaging and cancer detection devices to post-COVID-19 innovations.

Written by pioneers in the field—Bon Ku, a physician leader in innovative health design, and Ellen Lupton, an award-winning graphic designer—this book outlines the fundamentals of design thinking and highlights important products, prototypes, and research in health design. This revised and expanded edition describes innovations developed in response to the COVID-19 crisis, including an intensive care unit in a shipping container, a rolling cart with intubation equipment, and a mask brace that gives a surgical mask a tighter seal. Graphics by Lupton bring these ideas to life.
 
The authors also explore the special overlap of health care and the creative process, describing the development of such products and services as a credit card–sized device that allows patients to generate their own electrocardiograms; a mask designed to be worn with a hijab; improved emergency room signage; and a map of racial disparities and COVID-19. Health Design Thinking is an essential volume for health care providers, educators, patients, and designers who seek to create better experiences and improved health outcomes for individuals and communities.

Bon Ku, MD, a practicing emergency physician, is Marta and Robert Adelson Professor of Medicine and Design at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, where he is also Director of the Health Design Lab. Ellen Lupton is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, and Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the author of Beautiful Users, Design Is Storytelling, The Senses: Design Beyond Design, and other books.