Designing Products and Services for Healthy Ageing: Design as an iterative process of discovery

<p dir="ltr">INNOVATE UK KTN Health Ageing - Invited presentation series, to 40+ start-up businesses. Presentation to make the case for Design-led Innovation in the development of products, services and systems aimed at older adults.</p><p dir="ltr">The presentation makes the case for Design as the investigative process, which uncovers and frames value for the business. It compares and contrasts the different presentation of a Design Process and discusses their relationship to processes of Entrepreneurship (drawing from Valencia, A., Lievesley, M. and Vaugh, T., (2021) Four Mindsets of Designer-Entrepreneurs. The Design Journal, Vol.24 Iss5 pp.705-726.).</p><p dir="ltr">Case-study examples are presented to contrast a design-at-the-end approach with a design-from-the-beginning approach (drawing from Aftab M., English S., Lievesley M.A., et al (2016) Design Entrepreneurship in Innovation. Proceedings of the 20th DMI Academic Design Management Conference, Boston, USA.)</p><p dir="ltr">Designing from the point-of-view of service-users is presented (drawing from Lievesley, M.A., Wassall, R. (2015) Designing across organisational boundaries - Community Dental Services. Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Design 4 Health. Sheffield Hallam University, UK.) and illustrated with a series of healthcare/medical product development and health and care service improvement projects.</p><p dir="ltr">Conclusions centre on designing as an iterative process of discovery - which supports:</p><p dir="ltr">*prioritising an understanding of people - with emotional needs not just functional needs.</p><p dir="ltr">*prioritising people/users over technologies</p><p dir="ltr">*embedding need-seeking drivers for innovation processes inside companies - which links in to entrepreneurship as a practice.</p>