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

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.

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.).

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.)

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.

Conclusions centre on designing as an iterative process of discovery - which supports:

*prioritising an understanding of people - with emotional needs not just functional needs.

*prioritising people/users over technologies

*embedding need-seeking drivers for innovation processes inside companies - which links in to entrepreneurship as a practice.