Adaptive Path Blog

It started with an Open Letter to Steve Jobs. Dear Steve Jobs, Amy Tenderich wrote,

I’m writing to you on behalf of millions of people who walk around wired to little tech devices and won’t leave the house without them. No, I’m not talking about the iPod — and that’s the point. While your brilliant product line enhances the lifestyle of (100) millions, I’m talking about the little devices that keep us alive, the people with chronic conditions.

Let’s talk about diabetes, the disease that affects 20 million Americans, and I’m one of them.

…

Whether blood glucose monitor or insulin pump, thanks to the achievements of medical device companies, we can now live a normal life by constantly monitoring and adjusting our blood sugar levels.

But have you seen these things? They make a Philips GoGear Jukebox HDD1630 MP3 Player look pretty! And it’s not only that: most of these devices are clunky, make weird alarm sounds, are more or less hard to use, and burn quickly through batteries. In other words: their design doesn’t hold a candle to the iPod.

…

This is where the world needs your help, Steve. We’re people first and patients second. We’re children, we’re adults, we’re elderly. We’re women, we’re men. We’re athletes, we’re lovers.

If insulin pumps or continuous monitors had the form of an iPod Nano, people wouldn’t have to wonder why we wear our “pagers” to our own weddings, or puzzle over that strange bulge under our clothes. If these devices wouldn’t start suddenly and incessantly beeping, strangers wouldn’t lecture us to turn off our “cell phones” at the movie theater.

In short, medical device manufacturers are stuck in a bygone era; they continue to design these products in an engineering-driven, physician-centered bubble. They have not yet grasped the concept that medical devices are also life devices, and therefore need to feel good and look good for the patients using them 24/7, in addition to keeping us alive.

Clearly, we need a visionary to champion this disconnect. We need an organization on the cutting edge of consumer design to get vocal about this issue. Ideally, we need a “gadget guru” like Jonathan Ive to show the medical device industry what is possible.

What we need here is a sweeping change in industry-wide mentality — achievable only if some respected Thought Leader tackles the medical device design topic in a public forum. We therefore implore you, Mr. Jobs, to be that Thought Leader.

I read this plea and thought, wait, it’s not just Steve and Jonny who can do this stuff. Don’t I work at a design firm? Don’t we have the experience design tools to tackle this challenge? Why, yes. Yes, we did.

I sent around an email to our staff. Would we be interested in working on this as a Research & Development project? People got excited. Adaptive Path staffers had family who had diabetes. It was important; it would make a difference in people’s lives, and it affected us personally. We were onboard.

We carved out a chunk of time between projects — nine weeks, as it turned out — to do this project. With the complicated subject area and issues we uncovered during research, we easily could have taken nine months, but we were on our own dime here, so time was a constraint. We put together a small team consisting of me, Rachel Hinman, Alexa Andrzejewski, Rae Brune, Sebastian Heyke, and Jamin Hegemin. Jesse James Garrett and Julia Houck-Whitaker were our project sponsors and de facto “clients” for the project.

We spent three weeks just learning about diabetes and talking to patients and experts, then another week analyzing and taking in all the data we gathered. We spent another two weeks concepting; creating as many ideas as we could around the design principles we’d come up with. My next post will talk about this process. Once we narrowed down to an idea, we created the visual and interaction design to really flesh out that concept, then a movie to explain the vision.

I hope our solution delights you. I think it solves the problem of diabetics carrying around clunky, ugly objects that work somewhat well, but certainly aren’t easy or pleasurable to use and own. And Amy, I hope this answers your challenge. But more than that, I hope our process is adopted by more medical device manufacturers and their design partners (call us!), as I think it will improve their products, making them fit the lives of their customers more comfortably and more naturally.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under Charmr Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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