Design Lab with Bon Ku

Latest Episodes:

EP 108: Designing Through the Lens of Policy | Rick Griffith Feb 16, 2023

Show notes

On today's episode, we are going to talk about design through the lens of policy.

Rick Griffith is a British-West-Indian collagist, writer, letterpress printer, designer, and optimist futurist based in Denver, Colorado. As a designer, he works at the intersection of programming, policy, and production. He is a columnist for PRINTmag.com, the two-time programming chair for the AIGA National Conference, and the 2023 Acuff Chair at Austin Peay State University. Rick’s works are collected and exhibited worldwide and can be found in the permanent collections of The Denver Art Museum, The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and The Tweed Museum at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is a founder and partner with Debra Johnson of the graphic design consultancy MATTER, the designer behind the Black Astronaut Research Project (BLARP.org), The Pledge for Spaces, and the Introductory Ethic for Designers and Other Thinking Persons. One of his favorite long-term design projects is a bookstore for designers and revolutionaries. He DJs a live Internet radio show, Design To Kill, every Tuesday 6 pm Eastern Time.

Episode mentions and links:

MATTER Studio

Shop at MATTER: For designers and other thinking persons

Rick Griffith: A Love Letter to Design, a List of Demands, and a Stern Look via Print Magazine

Rick’s Book Recommendations:

The Black Experience in Design

You Need a Manifesto

Buy Health Design Thinking via Shop at MATTER

50% OFF until 3/31/23 if you use discount code: designlab

The Restaurant Rick would take you to in NYC:

B&H Dairy Kosher Restaurant

Follow Rick: Twitter |Insta | LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/108

EP 107: Designing the Hospital at Home | Helen Ouyang Feb 02, 2023

Show notes

Can hospital care be delivered at home? Will the hospital of the future only consist of ERs, ORs and ICUs?

Dr. Helen Ouyang is an emergency physician, Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Her writing has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and funded by The Pulitzer Center. Helen has worked in 20 countries across five continents in public health and humanitarian assistance. Her publications have also appeared in many academic medical journals, including The Lancet and JAMA, and she currently serves as a reviewer for Annals of Emergency Medicine and Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. She is also a mentor-editor for The OpEd Project. Until 2015, Helen was the Associate Director of Columbia’s International Emergency Medicine Fellowship. After graduating with a bachelor of arts from Brown University, Helen went to medical school at Johns Hopkins and studied for a master’s in public health at Harvard, where she was also a Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. Upon completing her training at Harvard, at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, she moved out to the Pacific Northwest before finding her way back to the East Coast.

Episode mentions and links:

https://helenouyang.com

Your Next Hospital Bed Might Be At Home via NY Times Magazine

Can Virtual Reality Help Ease Chronic Pain via NY Times Magazine

Restaurant Helen would take you to: Bernie’s Restaurant

Follow Helen: Twitter | LinkedIn

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/107

EP 106: Designing Health Across Scales | Joanne Cheung Jan 26, 2023

Show notes

Health is not a luxury product. But why have our systems commodified health? How might we design health into our everyday lives?

Joanne Cheung is an artist and designer. She formerly served as a Director of Systems Change at the global design firm IDEO. In her ongoing effort to amplify the public impact of research and policy through design, she spearheaded creative collaborations with institutions including the Icelandic Glaciological Society, Harvard Earth and Planetary Sciences Visualization Lab, Harvard Office of Sustainability, Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and Dartmouth Life Sciences Center. She has been a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the American Association of University Women, an Artist-in-Residence at the Icelandic Association of Visual Artists, and a speaker at Duke Center on Law & Technology and the National Academy of Sciences, and her work has been featured in Wallpaper, Wired, Azure Magazine, Fast Company, and the New York Times. She lectures at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Episode mentions and links:

https://joannekcheung.com

https://medium.com/@jcheung

IDEO: First Mile Health via Building H

Upstreaming Health, a d.school class by Joanne Cheung, Stephen Downs, and Sara Singer

Joanne would take you to a Thai Temple Backyard Brunch at: Wat Mongkolratanaram

Follow Joanne: Twitter

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/106

EP 105: Designing for Creativity in Medicine | Vidya Viswanathan Jan 13, 2023

Show notes

What role does creativity play in the field of medicine?

Vidya Viswanathan is a writer and primary care pediatrician in Philadelphia. She founded Doctors Who Create, a community focused on medicine and creativity, and led the Creativity in Medicine conference in Philadelphia in 2019. She has published longform journalism and narrative nonfiction in outlets including The Atlantic, Vox, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and JAMA. Vidya trained at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for pediatrics residency. She attended undergrad at Harvard College where she majored in Social Studies and studied Mandarin Chinese, and spent the year afterward on a Fulbright scholarship teaching English in Taiwan. She did her post-bac studies after her return, and moved to Philadelphia for medical school–and hasn’t left since. Currently, Vidya is dabbling in fiction writing and working on a novel about women of color in medical training. She lives in Philly with her husband and their twin toddlers, and reads several (children’s) books a day.

Episode mentions and links:

https://vidyaviswanathan.com/

Sara Nović - Author and Educator

“The House of God,” a Book as Sexist as It Was Influential, Gets a Sequel - New Yorker

Blue Stoop

Suzanne Koven - Letters to a Young Female Physician

Restaurant Vidya would take you to: L’anima

Follow Vidya: Twitter | LinkedIn

EP 104: Designing the Future Healthcare Workforce | Norma Padrón Jan 05, 2023

Show notes

Did you know that the healthcare industry is the largest employer in the U.S.? Learn how an economist turned healthcare entrepreneur is redesigning how we train the workforce of tomorrow.

Dr. Norma Padrón is a Latina and first-gen economist with a doctorate in health economics who founded EmpiricaLab—a company specializing in peer–to–peer training within healthcare organizations to accelerate their digital transformation.

She earned a Ph.D. in health policy and management from Yale University; a master's degree in economics from Duke University, as well as another master's degree— in public health-from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; She has a bachelor's degree in economics with a math minor, from the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.

She has held leadership roles across the healthcare industry, including in academia, nonprofit and private sector. Her teams have leveraged data analytics and technology to improve digital health products for patients and providers, design value-based care models, and quality and performance measurement and training.

In addition to her work in health economics and analytics, Norma has held board positions in STEM education and technology, including as Chair of the industry advisory board for an NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center focused on improving healthcare through organizational transformation.

Her company, EmpiricaLab, is in Beta and has received funding from programs like the AWS Impact Accelerator for Women Founders and the Techstars Workforce Development Program.

Episode Links and Mentions:

EmpiricaLab

US Census Bureau: Who Are Our Health Care Workers?

Norma’s fav restaurants:

Launderette Austin

Bar Ciccio Alimentari - NYC

Follow Norma: Twitter

EP 103: Designing Planetary Health | Chethan Sarabu Dec 29, 2022

Show notes

Did you know that the U.S. healthcare system is responsible for 10% of national greenhouse gas emissions? Learn how a pediatrician trained in landscape architecture is using clinical informatics and design to address the health impacts of climate change.

Chethan Sarabu, MD trained in landscape architecture, pediatrics, and clinical informatics builds anastomoses across these fields to design healthier environments and systems. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford Medicine, Director of Clinical Informatics at Sharecare. Across these roles, he works on designing and implementing a wide array of innovations ranging from patient portals, EHR transformation, virtual clinical trials, and A.I. driven digital biomarkers, to health information policy initiatives all through a lens of health equity and patient privacy. Drawing on his background in landscape architecture, Chethan implements and researches nature based health solutions such as the health benefits of urban green and blue spaces and Park prescriptions with the Stanford OurVoice and Natural Capital teams. Finally, he is shaping the emergent field of climate health informatics, which brings together emergency preparedness, sustainability, and environmental health, with a technology framework for climate health adaptation and mitigation.

Episode mentions and links:

Olmsted.health

Lancet Countdown

Chethan’s restaurant suggestion: https://omsabor.com/

Follow Chethan: Twitter | LinkedIn

EP 102: Designing the Stage for Better Health | Upali Nanda Dec 22, 2022

Show notes

Learn how an architect is setting the stage for better health by design, the relationship between neuroscience and architecture and design diagnostics.

Dr. Upali Nanda is Global Practice Director for Research at HKS, a 1500 person international architecture firm. She also teaches as Associate Professor of Practice at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning at University of Michigan and serves as the Executive Director for the non-profit Center for Advanced Design Research and Education (CADRE). She is the author of the book “Sensthetics: a crossmodal approach to designing for the senses”. Her widely published research on health and wellbeing, neuroscience and architecture, and outcome-driven design has won numerous awards. In 2015, Dr. Nanda was recognized as one of the top 10 most influential people in Healthcare Design by the Healthcare Design Magazine. In 2018, she was honored by Architectural Record with the Women in Architecture Innovator Award and in 2020 she was featured in the book on 100 women who changed architecture. Her design research is anchored on the art, and the science, of being human.

Episode mentions and links:

HKS Research

CADRE Research

UM Health BY Design course

Upali on Point of Decision Design

Article: Design Diagnostics

Outcomes examples:

CADRE Living Learning Lab

HKS Generations of Care Tower

Upali’s restaurant suggestion: Roti Wraps at Jiti’s

Follow Upali: Twitter

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/102

EP 101: Designing the Immune System of Mental Health | Susan Swick Dec 15, 2022

Show notes

Learn about how Dr. Susan Swick is challenging the paradigm of mental health, redesigning the future of behavioral health facilities and why every community needs a gym for building our mental health resilience.

Susan Swick, MD, MPH is the Executive Director of Ohana, designing and leading the development of this Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California. In addition to evaluation and treatment programs that are evidence-based and family-focused. Ohana programs will also emphasize the cultivation of mental health at the individual, family and community level. This Center is being created with the support of a landmark $100 million gift from a single donor in the hospital’s community, reflecting a recognition on both the hospital’s and the community’s part that the resources available to families seeking care for their children’s mental health challenges were sorely lacking. Dr. Swick has a long-standing interest in how adversity affects children and families, and in how well-timed interventions can make a critical difference. Prior to relocating to California in 2018, Dr. Swick served as the Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Newton Wellesley Hospital for five years. While at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, she created a new community health initiative called “The Resilience Project,” partnering with local High Schools to promote the mental health and well-being of youth and their families. She also directed the Parenting At a Challenging Time (PACT) program at Newton-Wellesley, a parent guidance program available to cancer patients who were still raising young children. She was an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she created and ran a course on Parent Guidance for the Child Psychiatry fellows. She attended Medical School at Columbia University, where she also received a Masters in Public Health. She, her husband and their four children are all east-coasters originally, but are happy to call California home.

Episode Mentions and Links

AIA 2022 Healthcare Design Awards: Montage Health Ohana Center

NBBJ Architects: Ohana Center for Health

NBBJ Architects: Hope, Healing, and Healthcare

A New Tool in Treating Mental Illness: Building Design via NYT

Donate to Ohana

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/101

EP 100: Clip Show Special Dec 08, 2022

Show notes

Thank you for supporting us through 100 episodes and getting us to 100,000 downloads! In this episode, Bon and Rob play back some of our favorite clips from early episodes and reminisce about all we have learned along the way.

Guests featured in this episode:

EP 1: Ellen Lupton, Sharing the Power of Design

Listen on Apple Podcasts

EP 2: Nzinga Harrison, Designing for Mental Health

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EP 3: Mike Natter, Art, Storytelling, and Medicine

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EP 7: John Maeda, Technology and Design

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EP 8: Giorgia Lupi, Designing with Data

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EP 9: Craig Wilkins, Spacial Justice

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EP 10: BJ Miller, Designing Death

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EP 18: Cliff Kuang, Designing a User Friendly World

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EP 59: Susannah Fox, Designing Peer-to-Peer Health

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Episode Links and Mentions:

Thad Ziolkowski’s on Surfing and Addiction

Rob’s blood glucose nightlight: https://glowcose.com/

Podcast statistics referenced from Daniel Ruby via Demand Sage: https://www.demandsage.com/podcast-statistics

Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/episode100

Show Sources & Links:

Sign-up for Design Lab Podcast’s Newsletter

Previous Episode Newsletters and Shownotes

Follow @DesignLabPod on Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Facebook

Follow @BonKu on Twitter & Instagram

Check out the Health Design Lab

Production by Robert Pugliese

Edit by Fernando Queiroz

Cover Design by Eden Lew

Theme song by Emmanuel Houston

Indexed in the Library of Congress: ISSN 2833-2032

EP 99: Designing Caregiving | Edith Elliott and Shahed Alam Dec 01, 2022

Show notes

How can we design for trust? What is the most transformative force in healthcare? On today's episode, you're going to learn how students at a design class at Stanford started Noora Health.

Edith Elliott and Shahed Alam are Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noora Health, an international non-profit that improves health outcomes and strengthens health systems by equipping patients and their loved ones with essential caregiving skills. Working across 300+ health facilities in India and Bangladesh, Noora Health turns hospital hallways and waiting rooms into classrooms to deliver fit-for-purpose, high-quality training for post-surgical, post-delivery, and general care, then follows up with families at home using mobile messaging technologies. To date, Noora Health's programs have reached nearly 2 million patients and caregivers. Noora Health was named a 2022 TED Audacious Project grantee and recipient of the 2022 Skoll Award for Social Innovation.

Episode Links and Mentions:

https://www.noorahealth.org/

Design For Extreme Affordability

Audacious Project

Audacious Project 2021-22 Cohort

2022 Skoll Award For Social Innovation

TED2022 Edith Elliott and Shahed Alam

The food Edith and Shahed would treat you to if you visited them in India is first a Pani Puri Happy Hour at the Noora Office followed by Dosas at Jayadeva Institute!

Follow Noora Health: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Episode Website/Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/designlabpod/noorahealth

More episode sources & links

Sign-up for Design Lab Podcast’s Newsletter

Previous Episode Newsletters and Shownotes

Follow @DesignLabPod on Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Facebook

Follow @BonKu on Twitter & Instagram

Check out the Health Design Lab

Production by Robert Pugliese

Edit by Fernando Queiroz

Cover Design by Eden Lew

Theme song by Emmanuel Houston