How design puts people at the heart of the Heart Foundation

My name's Bridget Malcolm. I'm a senior designer  and researcher here at the UTS Design Innovation  

Research Centre. My role is to lead design  projects with really interesting teams of people  

and clients with challenging problems. We work  with a really broad range of clients here – in  

fact over the last 10 years we've completed over  150 projects and they range from reimagining the  

prison system to designing models of care in the  health sector. The Heart Foundation came to UTS  

looking to understand how to better support  people who are living with a heart condition,  

and they wanted to do that through a design  approach. We're undertaking this research  

partnership in collaboration with the UTS  Centre for Business and Social Innovation.  

The Heart Foundation chose to partner with UTS  because we really needed some new thinking to the  

way in which we were approaching providing support  and care to patients or people with heart disease.  

Traditionally our approach to patient  education and support has been very linear;  

we really needed the skills of an  organisation or a university like UTS  

to come in and really complement the way in  which we approach our strategies to support  

patients or people in the community. The  Design Innovation Research Centre is a social  

design agency embedded within the University of  Technology Sydney. We work across the forefront  

of design helping organisations with challenging  situations. What design does is it takes you out  

of the organisation. It gives you metaphors to  look at and it also helps people to think of  

a different future and if you begin to think  of a different future you'll become more open  

to different ways of addressing problems. We've  worked really closely with the Heart Foundation to  

understand the problem, and one of the ways that  we've done that is we have created a visual map of  

the healthcare system. These visual maps can  be a really powerful way to diagnose where  

to intervene in a problem. The process has  been fantastic. It has been a real journey  

of discovery. So we're bringing our knowledge  of the health problem, but business and design  

are bringing a whole different skill set to really  help us examine and look at the problem in a way  

that we would never do traditionally. In health  we hope that at the end of the day our partners  

find new ways to perceive the problems that  they've never gained traction on in the past and  

that they can use that perspective to implement  a new solution that works not just for them  

but for the communities and stakeholders that they  work with and that that change is long lasting.