Design Lab with Bon Ku

Latest Episodes:

EP 118: Designing Health Equity | Adriane Ackerman & Robert Fabricant May 04, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing for health equity.

Adriane Ackerman is a community convener, strategic innovator and life-long rabble-rouser. She currently directs several programs at the Pima County Health Department in Southern Arizona, including a $4 million grant program from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health to Advance Health Literacy, the department’s new Cultural Health initiative with its pilot project, SaludArte, the emerging Pima County Network for Equity and Resilience (PCNER), and the first ever Office of Health Policy, Resilience, and Equity, all of which aim to increase health literacy and equity through innovative models, by elevating and centering the leadership of historically and contemporarily excluded communities. Adriane holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Urban & Public Affairs and seeks to bring the depth of her lived experience to bear as she convenes, facilitates and uplifts the work of harm reduction from within bureaucracies and community partnerships.

Robert Fabricant is Co-Founder and Partner of Dalberg Design, where he brings human-centered design and innovation services to clients looking for new, creative approaches to breakthrough innovation and expanded collaborations in the field of social impact and international development. Before Dalberg, Robert Fabricant was the Vice-President of Creative for frog design, where he managed frog’s global leadership across Design Research, Product Design, Software Design, and Experience Strategy. Robert writes about Design and Social Impact for publications like HBR, SSIR, Fast Company, Rotman Business Journal, MIT Tech Review, ChangeObserver, and Core77. He is a member of the adjunct faculty at NYU and SVA. His client portfolio includes experience across verticals including financial services and financial inclusion, social impact, mobile and technology, healthcare and public health, and media. Robert has an MPS in Design and Technology from NYU and a BA from Yale University.

Episode mentions and links:

https://www.fabricant.design/

https://dalberg.com/who-we-are/our-leadership/robert-fabricant/

https://www.adrianeackerman.com/

Adriane’s previous work: https://www.portlandpeoplescoalition.org/

Adriane’s restaurant rec: La Indita (a mixture of native Sonoran, Pascua Yaqui, and Tarascan cuisine)

Robert’s restaurant rec: Le Succulent

Follow Adriane: LinkedIn

Follow Rob: LinkedIn | Twitter

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/118

EP 117: Designing Open-Source Medical Software | Maya Friedman & Kelly Watson Apr 27, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing open source medical software.

Maya Friedman is a digital product design lead and art director who designs solutions for unmet needs in the health tech and femtech spaces. She currently leads the user experience, visual and sonic design for Tidepool's FDA-cleared, automated insulin dosing mobile application, Tidepool Loop. She is also the founder of The Period Project, which supports the creation of an ecosystem of software solutions, research initiatives, and education to address the unmet needs of women+ with diabetes, through the different phases of a woman’s life cycle including menstruation and pregnancy. Prior to joining Tidepool, Maya was a creative lead for Allbodies Health, designing education to improve sex, mind and body literacy. She also worked as a creative at Made Music Studios, driving the design and strategy for digital-audio experiences, most notably leading a partnership with the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum to develop an audio-first design exhibition around alarm fatigue in hospital settings. She thrives leading a team of product designers, illustrators, user researchers and sound designers to design solutions for topics such as health and body literacy, menstrual health and alarm fatigue. Maya has her MFA in Media Design practices with a focus on femtech and sextech design from ArtCenter College of Design.

Kelly Watson is VP, Product & User Experience for Tidepool, a digital health nonprofit building solutions for people with diabetes. Kelly has worked to ensure the patient, the clinician and care partners are at the center of the product design process, leading Tidepool to achieve rapid market adoption growing its global ecosystem to over 450,000 people with diabetes and 12,000 clinicians. At Tidepool, she has led partnerships with many of the world’s largest diabetes medical device companies and technology companies. Previously Kelly worked in bench research at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, FDA (CBER-OVRR DVP) and the National Institute of Mental Health prior to building out a product design consultancy. She is an angel investor and advisor for emerging digital health startups. Kelly advocates for patient ownership of health data, interoperability and open healthcare standards.

Episode mentions and links:

https://www.tidepool.org

Tidepool loop has received FDA clearance

Tidepool loop origin story

Tidepool: Ways to give

Maya’s restaurant rec: Saffy’s

Kelly’s restaurant rec: Hook Fish Co.

Follow Maya: LinkedIn | Instagram

Follow Kelly: LinkedIn | Twitter

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/117

EP 116: Designing Hope in American Medicine | Ricardo Nuila Apr 20, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing hope in American medicine.

Dr. Ricardo Nuila works as an internal medicine doctor and hospitalist in his hometown of Houston. It’s hard for him to imagine practicing medicine anywhere else but at a safety-net hospital, where he focuses on a person’s healthcare problem. His experiences as a doctor gives his writing its fuel. Ricardo focuses mostly on health disparities, how policies affect real people, and the interface between art and medicine. He has written for Texas Monthly, VQR, The New York Times Sunday Review, The Atlantic.com, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He has also covered Hurricane Harvey and the COVID pandemic for The New Yorker. His short stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology as well as in McSweeney’s and other literary magazines. The New England Review published one of his short stories and awarded him with its inaugural Emerging Writer’s Award. Ricardo directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) at Baylor College of Medicine. This lab develops educational materials and experiences that weave the arts and humanities into medical education.

Episode mentions and links:

www.ricardonuila.com

Made to Care For Those Left Behind, This Hospital Leads the Way (Book Review via NYT)

Humanities Expressions and Arts Lab (HEAL)

Ricardo’s restaurant rec: Nancy’s Hustle

Follow Ricardo: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook;

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/116

EP 115: Designing the Built World for our Bodies | Sara Hendren Apr 06, 2023

Show notes

In this episode, we talk about what a body can do and how we meet the built world.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, professor at Olin College of Engineering, and the creator and host of the Sketch Model podcast. She is the author of What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, published by Riverhead/Penguin Random House. It was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and won the Science in Society Journalism book prize.

Sara is a humanist in tech. Her work of 2010-2020 includes collaborative public art, social design, and writing that reframes the human body and technology. Her work has been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama administration, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, The Vitra Design Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, among other venues, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She has been a National Fellow at the New America think tank, and her work has been supported by an NEH Public Scholar grant, residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute for Global Good, and an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. At Olin, she was also the Principal Investigator on a four-year initiative to bring more arts experiences to engineering students and faculty, supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Episode mentions and links:

https://sarahendren.com/

Sketch Model Podcast

Engineering at Home

AccessibleIcon.org

When The World Isn't Designed For Our Bodiesvia NYT

Restaurants Sara would take you to: Clover Food Lab

Follow Sara: LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/115

EP 114: Designing with Biology | Ritu Raman Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing with biology.

Dr. Ritu Raman is the d’Arbeloff Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her lab is centered on engineering adaptive living materials for applications in medicine and machines. Professor Raman has received several recognitions for scientific innovation, including being named a Kavli Fellow and a Ford Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences engineering and Medicine, an Army Young Investigator by the U.S. Department of Defense, and L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellow. She has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 lists, and is the author of the MIT Press book Biofabrication. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEM and has championed many initiatives to empower women in science, including being named a AAAS IF/THEN ambassador and founding the Women in Innovation and STEM Database at MIT (WISDM). Professor Raman received her BS from Cornell University and her PhD as an NSF Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Episode mentions and links:

https://rituraman.com/

Biofabrication

At the forefront of building with biology via MIT News

Restaurants Ritu would take you to: Sofra Bakery and Cafe

Follow Ritu: Twitter |Instagram | LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/114

EP 113: Designing a Good Death | Sunita Puri Mar 23, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing a good death.

Dr. Sunita Puri is the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, where she is also an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine. She completed medical school and residency training in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco followed by a fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Stanford. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. A graduate of Yale University and the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, JAMA, and, forthcoming, the New Yorker. She and her work have been featured in the Atlantic, People Magazine, PBS’ Christian Amanpour Show, NPR, the Guardian, BBC, India Today, and Literary Hub. She is passionate about the ways that the precise and compassionate use of language can empower patients and physicians to have the right conversations about living and dying.

Episode mentions and links:

https://sunitapuri.com/

That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour on Amazon

Why 'lost their battle' with serious illness is the wrong thing to say via NPR

We Must Learn to Look at Grief, Even When We Want to Run Away via NYT

Restaurants Sunita would take you to:

El Condor LA

Momed LA

Worcester: Mare E Monti Trattoria

Follow Sunita: Twitter |Instagram

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/113

EP 112: Designing Careful and Kind Care | Dominique Allwood Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

How can revolt against industrialized healthcare? Can we design careful and kind care?

Dr. Dominique Allwood is a healthcare leader with almost 20 years of experience working as a medical doctor and public health physician in healthcare in the UK. She enjoys variety and juggling multiple roles and is currently Chief Medical Officer of UCLPartners, a health innovation partnership across a population of 5.2 million people, and Director of Population Health at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, at a large teaching hospital in London. She is interested in a range of areas including improving equity, population health, anchor institutions, accelerating net zero in healthcare, clinical engagement, and quality improvement. She has worked extensively across healthcare in delivery, leadership, management and advisory roles for provider and commissioner organisations, academic institutions, national policy bodies, management consultancy, charities and think tanks. She holds an MPH, has previously undertaken a Darzi Fellowship in Clinical Leadership, and is an Associate Editor for BMJ Leader Journal. She is a Governor of University College Hospital and a Board member of The

Patient Revolution in the US. She was previously named a Rising Star in the Health Services Journal and shortlisted for a prestigious national mentoring award. She is currently completing an MBA at Henley Business School.

Episode mentions and links:

Careful, kind care is our compass out of the pandemic fog

Taking one step further: five equity principles for hospitals to increase their value as anchor institutions

Restaurant Dominique would take you to: Lefteris O Politis

Bonus: This is Athens: A beginners guide to souvlaki

Follow Dominique: LinkedIn | Twitter

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/112

EP 111: Designing Sh*t | Saffron Cassaday Mar 09, 2023

Show notes

Today, we are going to take a deep dive into the promising therapy of fecal transplantation

Saffron Cassaday directed her first documentary feature film called Cyber-Seniors in 2014. The film followed a group of senior citizens as they learned about the internet from teenage mentors and the connections made both on and offline. The film has been broadcast in 40 countries including on PBS, Netflix and CBC in North America. Cyber-Seniors screening events were supported by over 900 partners including AARP Foundation, Best Buy Foundation, BlueCross BlueShield Mn, and hundreds of schools, universities, and libraries.

In her new film “Designer Sh*t”, Saffron explores the efficacy of fecal transplant for her condition ulcerative colitis, using herself as a human guinea pig.

Episode mentions and links:

Designer Sh*t

Cyber Seniors

https://www.saffroncassaday.com/

Restaurant Saffron would take you to: Bud Namu Korean BBQ

Follow Saffron: Instagram | IMDb

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/111

EP 110: Designing for Behavior Change | Sherine Guirguis and Michael Coleman Mar 02, 2023

Show notes

Learn how behavioral designers are tackling the most complex health challenges on the planet.

As a founder and lead strategist at Common Thread, Sherine Guirguis turns data into powerful narratives. She brings over two decades of experience leading large-scale behaviour change strategies to tackle public health crises. She’s helped rid the world of polio, mitigate COVID-19, end West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, and respond to the Indian Ocean Tsunami. She spent 15 years working senior behaviour change positions at UNICEF and is widely published in public health and social and behaviour change. Sherine holds a MS in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a MA in International Development and Economics from Johns Hopkins University. She’s a guest lecturer at NYU’s School of Global Public Health and participates in numerous Technical Advisory Groups, including the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, PATH and the Taskforce for Global Health. Sherine lives in Barbados and loves riding horses, diving, and design in all its forms.

As a founder and lead storyteller at Common Thread, Michael Coleman ensures that people weigh in on decisions that impact and depict their lives. Through senior communications posts with UN agencies in Angola, Pakistan, and Viet Nam, and experience in social development, documentary production and international journalism, Mike has gained invaluable experience crafting people-centred narratives. Through his work in polio eradication and responding to violence against health workers in Pakistan, he learned the importance of human-centred design. Mike holds a MA in Political Communications from Goldsmiths at the University of London. He is part of a USAID and Gates initiated Community of Practice called Design for Health. He has lectured at NYU’s School of Global Public Health and served as a lead trainer for the US Center for Disease Control’s STOP Polio Programme. Mike is based in Ireland, where he spends his days biking, camping, and coaching his girls’ soccer team.

Episode mentions and links:

Poland: Not settling for less than home

Zambia and Kenya: Sprinting towards a stronger workforce

Global: Tracking vaccination the fun way

Restaurants Sherine and Mike would take you to:

Local and Co. Barbados

Birchalls Pub Dublin

Glas Restaurant Dublin

Follow Common Thread: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Follow Sherine: Twitter | LinkedIn

Follow Mike: LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/110

EP 109: Designing Harm Reduction | Kimberly Sue Feb 23, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing harm reduction.

Dr. Kimberly Sue is an Assistant Professor of Medicine with the Program in Addiction Medicine (Division of General Internal Medicine) at Yale University School of Medicine. She is the former Medical Director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition, New York, NY, which strives to improve the health and wellbeing of people who use drugs. Currently, she serves as an Attending Physician at the Central Medical Unit, APT Foundation, which provides primary care to patients receiving methadone and other substance use treatment services and supervises fellows and trainees within the Yale Addiction Medicine Fellowship program. She also is an Attending Physician on the hospital-based Yale Addiction Medicine Consult Service. She holds board certification in both Internal Medicine and Addiction Medicine. Dr. Sue trained at Harvard's MD-PhD Social Science Program, and has a PhD in sociocultural anthropology. Her book, Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis (2019), is based on her research on women with opioid use disorder in Massachusetts prison and jails. Her current research interests include harm reduction, stigma, gender/women and substance use, and overdose response strategies on local, state, and federal levels.

Episode mentions and links:

https://www.drkimsue.com/

Yale Medicine

Harm Reduction Coalition

Kim's Book: Getting Wrecked Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis

NEXT Distro (mail based harm reduction service)

On Point NYC

Restaurant Kim would take you to: Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana (or Sally’s or Modern or any one of the many highly revered New Haven Pizza joints)

Follow Kim: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/109

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