Design Lab with Bon Ku

Latest Episodes:

EP 49: Designing Decolonization | Dori Tunstall Nov 24, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Dori Tunstall joined Ontario College of Art & Design University in 2016, as Dean of Design. As part of the senior management team, she plays a vital role in steering aspects of the academic and administrative agendas within the Faculty of Design, as well as related research, outreach, fundraising and operational activities. As the university has initiated the challenge of decolonizing its institution, Dori advocates and communicates how Respectful Design serves the appropriate design ethos for this process. Dori is a design anthropologist, public intellectual, and design advocate who works at the intersections of critical theory, culture, and design. She leads the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative focused on using old ways of knowing to drive innovation processes that directly benefit communities. With a global career, Dori served as Associate Professor of Design Anthropology and Associate Dean at Swinburne University in Australia. She wrote the biweekly column Un-Design for The Conversation Australia. In the U.S., she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She organized the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative and served as a director of Design for Democracy. Industry positions included UX strategists for Sapient Corporation and Arc Worldwide. Dori holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. Bon talks with Dori about her journey from anthropology to design, role of design in new technologies and how we can decolonize design.

EP 48: Designing a DIY Artificial Pancreas | Dana Lewis Nov 18, 2021

Show notes

After building her own DIY “artificial pancreas,” Dana Lewis helped found the open source artificial pancreas movement (known as “OpenAPS”), making safe and effective artificial pancreas technology available (sooner) for people with diabetes around the world. She authored the book, "Automated Insulin Delivery: How artificial pancreas “closed loop” systems can aid you in living with diabetes", to help more people understand automated insulin delivery systems, in addition to a series of children's books such as "Understanding Automated Insulin Delivery: A basic book for kids, family, and friends of people living with diabetes", which is also available as a free animated video. She is currently researching numerous diabetes-related data science and open source artificial pancreas system projects. Bon talks with Dana about why she designed an “artificial pancreas”, patients as the experts, and how we can reduce stigma among people living with chronic diseases.

EP 47: Designing Vaccine Equity | Aika Matemu and Pragya Mishra Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

Bon talks with the Dalberg Design team (Aika, Pragya, Joy and Mihret) about designers as global health storytellers, the need for creativity in global health and the challenges of social media misinformation.

Aika Matemu is a Director at Dalberg Design in Nairobi, leading the design team in Africa. She brings over 15 years experience in user experience design, digital technologies, global public health and social entrepreneurism, with extensive experience in social impact and innovation. She has committed her career thus far to designing and building innovations that impact social change, movement and revolution. Her design career has been grounded in human-centered design methods with a focus on designing products and services that create channels for underserved populations to access quality health care. She's passionate about building design capacity on the African continent and elevating home grown designers to global design platforms.

Pragya Mishra is Director at Dalberg Design based in Seattle. She applies her expertise in visual and strategy design on social innovation, financial inclusion and global health projects. She brings a human-centered approach to her work that facilitates in-depth understanding of distinct user behaviors, attitudes and preferences towards products, services, and systems leading to actionable insights. Her recent work includes the development of Design for health – a tailored set of design resources for global health practitioners. Prior to joining Dalberg Design, Pragya worked as an independent designer with NGOs and governmental organizations on a range of social innovation projects. Pragya has a Masters in Design in Social Innovation from the School of Visual Arts (SVA), New York and an undergraduate degree in Visual Communication Design from the National Institute of Design (NID) in India.

Joy Kendi is a senior designer based in Dalberg Design's Nairobi studio. Her expertise is in product and service design, user experience and design research, with a focus on emerging markets. Prior to joining Dalberg Design, Joy led product design at a technology innovation hub in Kenya.

Mihret Tamrat is a designer with Dalberg Design’s Nairobi studio. Her design background includes works in education technology, game design, as well as gender and youth employment across the US, Asia, and East Africa. Prior to Dalberg Design, Mihret worked as a strategy consultant with Dalberg Advisors in Addis Ababa.

EP 46: Designing Healthcare Payment Equity | Josh Liao Nov 03, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Liao is a physician and Associate Chair for Health Systems in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington, where he is also the enterprise-wide Medical Director of Payment Strategy for UW Medicine. He trained in internal medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and was a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Liao is a leading national expert in health care payment and delivery policy, generating seminal work on value-based payment models, leading large grant-funded projects, and providing expertise to national and state policymakers through a number of capacities, including service on the US Department of Health and Human Services' Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee, as well as multiple state advisory groups for Washington state.

He has published 200+ articles, including over 150 in peer-reviewed medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the British Medical Journal. His ideas and insights have also appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post, Forbes, the Boston Globe, NPR, the Seattle Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bon and Josh talk about behavioral architecture, redesigning the healthcare payment system and the jump from Jacobean drama to Medicine.

EP 45: Designing for Inclusivity | Pinar Guvenc Oct 15, 2021

Show notes

Pinar Guvenc is a partner of SOUR, an international, award-winning architecture and design studio with the mission to address social and urban problems through sustainable, adaptive and inclusive methodologies. In addition to managing the business operations, she also leads strategic planning, research and partnerships of the studio. Prior to SOUR, Pinar co-founded various ventures where she helped set-up company infrastructure and grow them through funding or incubation, achieving international recognition and awards. New York Functional Furniture – an e-commerce platform for functional furniture designed in NYC, was acquired by Lazzoni USA after its showroom opening in 2015 and Sponge Inc. - a clean-tech startup - won three international awards, and has been accepted to EU’s Climate KIC Accelerator in Netherlands and Plug and Play Incubator in California, USA. Pinar is also part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design, School of Design Strategies and serves on the Board of Directors of Open Style Lab, a nonprofit organization initiated at MIT, with the purpose of making style accessible to people of all abilities. She created and teaches a strategic collaborations workshop series for Pratt Center for Community Development and Made in NYC initiative. Pinar is a frequent public speaker and a guest lecturer, and hosts the panels and podcasts of What's Wrong With, a series of discussions with progress makers and experts to diagnose real problems, ideate solutions and raise awareness to the general public. Pinar has a BSc in Industrial Engineering and MSc in Economics & Finance. Bon and Pinar talk about why inclusive design is better design, diagnostic ideation, and the broadening definition of health.

EP 44: Designing Stories as a Physician and Screenwriter | Roshan Sethi Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

Roshan Sethi is a screenwriter and is a radiation oncologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He graduated from Yale University and Harvard Medical School where he began his screenwriting career. He co-created Fox's The Resident and has written for TV shows including Code Black and Black Box. Recently he wrote and directed 7 Days, a rom-com that was featured this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bon and Sethi talk about the parallels between screenwriting and medicine, writing as an act of empathy, and the art of storytelling.

EP 43: Designing Acute Care | Monique Smith Sep 24, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Monique Smith is the Founding Executive Director of Health DesignED: The Acute Care Design + Innovation Center at Emory University, an emergency physician at Grady Memorial Hospital and a thought leader on design thinking in healthcare. With expertise nationally and across the globe in service design and systems strengthening, Monique leverages design to reimagine the spectrum of acute care within a large health system from the moment patients experience symptoms to long after they walk out of the hospital’s sliding glass doors. Dr. Smith has appeared in the New York Times and CNN and currently serves as a health equity and COVID-19 advisor for Fortune 100 companies. Prior to joining Emory, she advised early stage companies on tech-enabled care for seniors, digital vaccines, and virtual care platforms. Globally, she has worked across five continents to deploy data and technology in expanding access to care, addressing supply chain challenges, and systematically tackling health inequity. Monique is an innovation leader passionate about cross market solutions that drive equitable tech enabled care. Bon and Monique chat about the importance of understanding people’s lived experiences, health equity, and approaching problems in healthcare through a design lens.

EP 42: Designing Your Immune System | Wendy Sue Swanson Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson is a pediatrician, mom to two boys, and the Chief Medical Officer for SpoonfulONE. She is an author, a prominent advocate of evidence-based medicine, and has devoted her career to pediatric prevention efforts. Dr. Swanson was the founder and Chief of Digital Innovation at Seattle Children’s Hospital and has continued to be an important thought leader online for over a decade. Bon and Wendy talk about how we can design our immune system by introducing diverse foods, using social media for public health and the role of creativity in medicine.

EP 41: Designing Solutions in Global Health | Daniel Burka Sep 09, 2021

Show notes

Daniel Burka is a product manager and designer who focuses on solving complex global health problems in simple ways. He is the director of product and design at the not-for-profit Resolve to Save Lives, where he spends the majority of my time on the open source project, Simple.org. Simple is used by thousands of hospitals in India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia to manage over 950,000 patients with hypertension. In his prior life Daniel and his business partner Kevin Rose started an incubator company called Milk which we sold to Google a year later. He went on to become a design partner at Google Ventures for five years and worked with a huge variety of companies like Flatiron Health, Zipline, Farmers Business Network and Blue Bottle Coffee. In 2021, Daniel also started the open source Healthicons.org project to provide free icons to healthcare projects around the world. Bon and Daniel talk about reducing mortality in non-communicable diseases in India, the journey from Silicon Valley to Global Health and why everyone needs a design mindset.

EP 40: Designing Open Source Healthcare | Juhan Sonin Aug 26, 2021

Show notes

Juhan Sonin specializes in healthcare design and system engineering. He is the director of GoInvo (goinvo.com). The studio’s designs helped 700,000 Massachusetts residents receive food benefits, are used by Wikipedia to explain complex health concepts, and help manage care plans for 150 million US residents. His work has been recognized by the New York Times, Newsweek, BBC International, Wired Magazine, and NPR and he's published in The Journal of Participatory Medicine and The Lancet. Juhan has spent time at Apple, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and MITRE. He currently lectures on design and engineering at MIT. Juhan’s laser focus on healthcare and open source design has affected national efforts for the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF). His open source healthcare products have also been leveraged by Walgreens, Crossover Health, and Hallmark Clinics, to name a few. Next up in 2021 they are working to lead an open source, national push for patients owning their data. Bon and Juhan talk about open source healthcare, the need for a longitudinal health record for patients, and why Juhan shared his own genome publicly.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected