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IDSA Annual Report

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) just held their annual international conference in Boston, MA.  Jeremy Savage and I attended the 4-day event and had the pleasure of listening to some great presentations, ranging from the informative to the inspirational.

It has always struck me how important it is to have an integrated team of engineers and designers to create successful products, especially in the medical device field that is evolving with new FDA regulations relating to usability.  So as a mechanical engineer by training, I always enjoy gaining exposure into the industrial design field.  It allows me to turn off my engineering brain that focusses on specific components or system functions and think about the bigger picture of how people interact with devices.  After all, I love working in the medical and life-sciences field because I get to work on products that help people.

One of the more inspirational presentations at the IDSA conference was given by Bob Schwartz from GE Healthcare.   He emphasized that when designing medical devices it is essential to consider the entire use experience, not just how individual features affect use.

As an example, he discussed GE’s Adventure series of MR suites. While over the last couple decades design has certainly “beautified” MR Scanners, it has done little to actually improve the experience.  With the claustrophobic spaces, loud clanking noises and vibrations, an MRI scan can still be a truly terrifying experience for an adult; image how it is for a young child.

Imagine if it were possible to somehow take advantage of those perceived “negatives” from an MRI scan and turn them into a fun adventure.  Well that’s exactly what GE did by designing the entire MR suite to be a complete experience – an exciting spaceship experience! Now the claustrophobic experience of laying on a bed being slid into a tight MR Scanner bore was transformed into sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship.  The loud noises and vibrations of a scan are integrated into the experience of blasting off into deep space.  The sterility and lack of humanism was erased from the experience and replaced with a fun filled, imaginative adventure for a child.

Bob Schwartz relayed a particularly moving anecdote about one of the first children to experience the new MR suite.  After the scan (err… I mean deep space adventure) had finished, the child jumped off the bed, ran over to his mother and begged, “Mommy! Mommy! Can I please do that again??”

GE’s new design has managed to turn a dreaded medical procedure into an adventure that a child actually begs his mother to do again by considering and designing for the entire experience of use.  Now that’s some inspiration for an engineer and designer.

Photo courtesy of GE

 

Alex Flamm


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