How design puts people at the heart of the Heart Foundation

Descriptive transcript

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 human-centred 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. If you begin to think of a different future, you 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.