Adaptive Path Blog

Many UX people find themselves in organizations that are dominated by other schools of thought: business management, engineering, etc. That’s just one of the things that I find so inspirational about talking to Ryan Armbruster about the Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Program. The program integrates research and design methods into the culture of medicine and science at Mayo Clinic to repeatedly generate meaningful changes that improve the lives of patients and the effectiveness of the medical system supporting them.

Ryan spoke to the ability to connect design to the core values of the clinic in our recent interview:

“Mayo Clinic is open to the design-centered program because its values are rooted in patient needs. This value of patient coming first is in the hearts and minds of everybody in the organization.

Having a design program to articulate what those needs are and informing better solutions is a logical addition. That’s why design has been applied in the organization to play an important role in informing how our services are created and delivered.”

Ryan will be speaking on the transformational power of designing for emotions at Adaptive Path’s upcoming MX East conference. (When registering for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG to receive 10% off your final price.) During our discussion, I got a chance to understand more of how emotions applied to his work at the Mayo Clinic:

“What’s interesting in healthcare — as well as any service industry — is how to deal most effectively with the uncertainty of human emotions and human behavior. Emotion is complex. It’s not a rational system. As much as you want to try to design a service or a system that’s reliable and consistent, it won’t be effective if it doesn’t adapt to the many different situations that are present in the complexity of human emotions. But when you successfully design for emotion, it can dramatically influence the outcomes, such as a patients’ health.”

Check out the whole interview.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under Design Leaders, Experience Design, Experience Strategy, MX East. 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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