Hasta La Ideas

Oklahoma firm Kinslow, Keith & Todd has presented its vision to build a skyscraper shaped like a tornado on top of a Tulsa parking garage.

The towering structure, proposed within the region known as Tornado Alley, is designed to include a museum dedicated to weather, a storm research centre, a revolving rooftop bar and restaurant, and a grassy roof.

Lighting would also be added so that the whole building would appear to be slowly spinning to passing drivers.

Kinslow, Keith & Todd came up with the design after being asked by Tulsa People magazine for explore ways to rejuvenate the downtown area of the US city.

“The concept started as a way to get a revolving restaurant up high enough to have great sight lines of downtown, the Arkansas River, and the Osage hills,” explained studio co-founder Andrew Kinslow.

“As we worked on ways to make it more interesting than just a stick with a round restaurant on top, the swirling of a tornado concept was born.”

Conceived with a height of between 75 and 90 metres, the tower would be built on top of a two-storey 1920s-era warehouse, believed to have once housed trucking and vending companies. This location is a convenient distance from two local tourist attractions – the BOK Center and Cox Business Center.

Known as the Oklahoma Weather Museum & Research Center, the building could also include a training centre for storm chasers – researchers who follow tornados – as well as a broadcast station and cameras for local TV channels and weather reporters.

The exterior would be a mixture of glass and perforated metal, and the planted roof is envisioned as a garden of native Oklahoma grasses and plants.

The architects don’t currently have a client for the project, but have been approached by several developers keen to add houses and offices into the design. They hope to collaborate with science and technology consultant Kerry Joels, who has also been exploring the idea of a weather museum in Oklahoma.

“Since the original article was published in Tulsa People magazine there has been a tremendous amount of activity,” added Kinslow. “Who knows what tomorrow will bring.”

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The first day of Dublin creative conference Offset featured an inspiring insight into graphic design for filmmaking from Annie Atkins, plus talks from Hey Studio, Barber & Osgberby’s Edward Barber, Ian Anderson and Rory Hamilton, creative director at Dublin agency Boys And Girls.

While best known for her work on The Grand Budapest Hotel (you can read our interview with Atkins about her designs for the film here), Atkins has also worked on graphics, signage and props for Sky series Penny Dreadful, BBC period drama The Tudors and animated film The Boxtrolls, which featured a series of characters made out of cardboard boxes (Atkins was asked to design graphics and lettering for the characters’ costumes, inspired by Victorian-era packaging from around Europe):

“People assume I do movie posters and typesetting for credits, but I couldn’t make a living doing that…my day job is making the graphics that actors engage with,” she said.

A visual communications graduate, Atkins worked in advertising for four years before moving to Dublin to study filmmaking at the city’s University College. She quickly realised she didn’t enjoy directing, but said she became fascinated with production design.

Working on The Tudors, Atkins studied the work of traditional craftspeople such as glaziers and calligraphers – the graphic designers of the time, she said – to create court documents and graphic props such as death warrants by hand while on Penny Dreadful, she created Victorian signage and letterpress posters (for images, see Atkins’ website).

“The golden rule of graphic design for filmmaking is, ‘if it was made by hand at the time, make it by hand’,” she said. While she underlined the importance of authenticity and using traditional techniques, however, Atkins said large props often have to be constructed using cheap, lightweight materials instead of those traditionally used at the time, then aged to look convincing – signage in Penny Dreadful, for example, was created using Perspex and MDF then treated to create a stained glass effect.

Speaking about her work for The Grand Budapest Hotel, Atkins said she and the art department occupied the first floor of the building in which the film’s hotel interior scenes were shot, giving her a view over the performance as she worked.

Showing extracts from the script, Atkins demonstrated how nearly every scene of the film featured an original graphic prop – “on your first day, you sit down with a script and a highlighter, marking anything that might be your responsibility. You might have two pieces per page, or sometimes nothing at all – but on Grand Budapest, there were highlighter marks all over the place,” she said. “I knew there was going to be a high volume of work, because of how particular [Anderson] is – if a handkerchief [in a scene] is going to have a pattern, it’s not just going to be any old pattern. If there’s a bottle of champagne, it will be one designed in the style of that period,” she said.

One of the biggest challenges in designing for the film was juggling the production schedule, said Atkins – which is usually determined based on locations and the availability of actors, meaning props have to be designed out of sequence.

With this in mind, Atkins said it was important to think about continuity – “when you’re working on a film, it’s the most boring, tedious part of making it but once it comes out, it’s the most fascinating, because people notice if you get it wrong,” she said. With graphic props so fragile, Atkins said she had to create several versions of each one – usually six – and dozens for those which would be handled by an actor.

“If you’re making something that’s going to be ‘destroyed’ in shot [for example, a letter that will be opened by a character], you need to make 12 or 15 copies, and if it’s for Wes Anderson, you’ll make 30 or 40 copies because he might do 30 or 40 takes,” she said, citing examples of a bloodstained telegram she made by hand (pictured), ensuring bloodstain patterns were the same on each.

As demonstrated in our feature on Atkins, the attention to detail in her work for The Grand Budapest Hotel is astonishing – in one scene, where a character presents a ‘crudely drawn’ prison map on a piece of cardboard packaging, Atkins’ graphics team not only drew the map, but created stamps for the fictional empire of Zubrowka featuring original illustrations of a fictional emperor as well as a handwritten address and postage marks, all for a split second of viewing time.

Atkins also discussed Anderson’s painstaking attention to detail when making the film – he wrote all of the articles featured in the film’s newspapers in full – researching Himmler, Hitler and Eva Braun’s calling cards to create a business card for one of the film’s key characters – and the challenges of ensuring accuracy without copywriters or editors to check spelling and grammar.

While graphics played a starring role in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Atkins said even props which go largely un-noticed by audiences can play an important role in the making of a film or TV show.

“We’re not always designing for cinema audiences – sometimes, its purely for the director and actors,” she explained. “Film sets don’t look like they do in the cinema – they’re full of lights and cables and people standing around in North Face jackets. Its not the most authentic world…so we do everything we can to make it more authentic…it takes so many people to make a film, and the graphic department is such a small part of that, but it all goes some small way to helping create that bigger picture,” she said.

Offset also featured a talk from Ricardo Jorge and Veronica Fuerte of Barcelona studio Hey, who discussed some of the studio’s recent graphic design and illustration commissions as well as their personal projects and exhibitions. While the studio started out focusing on graphic design, the pair said 50 percent of their commercial work is now illustration.

Speaking about their love of colour and tactile processes – and proving that beautiful work can be produced on a small budget – Jorge and Fuerte presented identities for Art Fad, an annual contemporary art and craft fair, for which they hand made covers featuring the letter ‘A’ using colourful silk ribbon, Maxon comic patterns and triangles of coloured card (above and below):

A low-cost packaging and identity solution for Jammy Yummy, a business set up by a friend of Fuerte’s selling homemade savoury jams, which was created using a hole punch, and an identity for glass artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert (pictured below). The studio created business cards and catalogues by laser burning wood, inspired by the process of heating glass. “We wanted to represent fire, but it’s difficult to do in graphics,” said Fuerte. The process means no two business cards are the same, while coloured ribbons added to catalogues echo the colours used in Wintrebert’s work.

They also discussed creating large-scale illustrations for Three’s Dublin offices, a charming animation for CBS Outdoor on consumer behaviour and their Oh My God exhibition at London’s Kemistry Gallery, as well as the studio’s Instagram project, every_hey, for which they created a new character each day, based on news, popular culture and film and TV characters.

Edward Barber of Barber & Osgerby discussed some of the studio’s recent projects, from the Science Museum’s Information Age exhibition to V&A show In the Making, which offered a look at how everyday objects from pencils to dining chairs are produced. He also spoke about the studio’s love of model making, his fascination with manufacturing techniques and traditional craftsmanship – and the process of designing the 2012 Olympic Torch.

The studio was given just 10 days to create a prototype for the torch, said Barber, deciding which materials to use and how the flame itself would look when lit. To test the heat reistance of various materials, they constructed a model using an Ikea utensil holder and a table tennis table, before making life sized models from gold card and foam.

When developing a concept for the torch, Barber said the triangular design was inspired by the Olympic Games’ three-word motto – faster, higher, stronger – and the fact that London has held the Olympic games three times. Its 8000 perforations represent each of the relay runners who were given a torch, but was also used to reduce materials costs.

Rory Hamilton, creative director of Dublin ad agency Boys And Girls, gave an entertaining insight into the making of spots for Guinness while he was at BBDO, including Dot, inspired by a talk by Javier Mariscal on colour, and the restrictions of advertising for drinks brands. “You think it’s the promised land, but it’s so carefully regulated, it can be very restrictive…you end up with three men at a bar,” he said.

With Dot, the company travelled to Vancouver to shoot a scene that would start with a close-up of a man’s pupil before zooming out to a street in the city, but was forced to abandon the shoot because of strong winds. The ad had to be constructed in 3D by Psyop instead, and took two years to make. He also discussed the making of an ad starring Emperor penguins for Guinness, which was shot in the Arctic and Antarctic and took 18 months to make.

Hamilton set up Boys And Girls five years ago – the company has since created print ads for whiskey brands, Digicell and John West – but budgets and deadlines are much tighter. Its Christmas spot for Three, for example, had to be shot in just six weeks.

Ian Anderson gave an A-Z of The Designers Republic, presenting a whistlestop tour of 29 years of projects from Autreche artwork to packaging for Coca Cola, while graphic designer and artist Peter Maybury discussed audio visual experiments, using typography to visually represent sound for seven-volume Sub Rosa box set, An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music and a beautifully produced publication for artist Shaziah Sikander (more pics here):

And Neils Shoe Muelman gave a brief insight into his Calligraffiti – large-scale calligraphic illustrations – and the thinking behind group project Abstract Vandalism, a show featuring large-scale graffiti and street art.

Tomorrow’s line-up features Tomi Ungerer, photographer Aisha Zeijpveld, Veronica Ditting, Snask and Forsman & Bodenfors. For details, see iloveoffset.com or follow @weloveoffset on Twitter.

The final day of Dublin’s OFFSET conference featured talks from Why Not Associates’ Andy Altmann, art director Sue Murphy, photographer Matthew Thompson, illustrator Andrew Rae, Pentagram partner Emily Oberman and designer Matt Willey.

Sue Murphy, an art director and designer at Wolff Olins and former art director at Ogilvy & Mather, spoke about creating digital experiences and online content for IBM and why she left design studio Edenspiekermann to work in advertising.

As an art director at Ogilvy & Mather, Murphy worked exclusively for IBM, creating a Tumblr site to showcase the company’s products and patents and working on its Open Sessions project for the US Open (a collaboration with musician James Murphy, the project used IBM data gathered from matches to generate music, producing an original song for each match. (Sue) Murphy worked on a website and exhibition for the project and commissioned illustrations for 250 tracks).

Murphy said her fascination with design began when she was given an IBM computer as a child and access to the internet aged 11 – “I would make lots of glittery websites. I didn’t know you could copy and paste so I’d copy out html tables by hand,” she said. After graduating with a degree in visual communications from Dublin’s IADT in 2009, she went on to study for a Master’s in advertising and worked as a designer at Edenspiekermann in Amsterdam, but says she suffered from ‘burnout’ after a year. “I had put too much pressure on myself…I got to the stage where I wasn’t enjoying designing, and that scared me,” she said.

After coming across a quote by David Ogilvy on the company’s approach to teaching young people in advertising, Murphy contacted the agency’s recruitment team and after a Skype call, was offered a job in its New York office.

As well as creating the US Open project and IBM’s tumblr, IBMblr (for which she was required to produce a new GIF or animation for each new patent or piece of news the company produced), Murphy worked on campaigns for IBM’s fellowship and Women in Tech. She also began to collect designs from IBM’s and Ogilvy’s archives, and set up a blog, Good Design is Good Business, to publish the designs she found online .

Now working as a senior designer and art director at Wolff Olins, Murphy said she was enjoying working for multiple clients with no fixed job description – and reminded her audience to “find out what you like to do and find a way to incorporate that into your day job.” While she has a background in advertising, she said she disliked traditional paid for media such as banners, preferring to create new kinds of online content instead. It was an honest reflection on her career so far, with an impressive portfolio of work in just a few years after graduating.

Matt Willey

Graphic designer Matt Willey (CR’s designer of the year in 2014), delivered an equally honest talk on how he ‘accidentally’ became a graphic designer, and showed some of the process behind work for Zembla, Port, The Independent and the New York Times magazine.

As a child, Willey was diagnosed as profoundly deaf and his parents were told he wouldn’t be able to speak or study in mainstream education. With the help of a speech therapist, however, he started school a few years later. While he didn’t particularly enjoy school, Willey said he loved drawing and studied art at GCSE level, then A level, eventually earning a place on an illustration degree course at Central Saint Martins before switching to graphic design. “I didn’t get on with illustration, so I tried photography and that didn’t work out, then I went on to study graphic design…I’ve always been quite jealous of people who knew what they wanted to do from an early age,” he said.

After a period at Frost Design, where he worked on pop culture and literary magazine Zembla, Willey set up Studio 8 with partner Zoë Bather, working on editorial design, identities and exhibition graphics.

While best known for his editorial work, Willey said it was never his intention to focus on just one discipline, adding: “Your portfolio becomes a self-perpetuating thing…but it always slightly hurt me when people thought I just did magazines,” he added.

Offering an insight into the painstaking process of creating a great cover, he presented several failed ideas for Zembla (a fascinating selection of images which we covered on the blog back in August, and shown in the film above) – before going on to discuss the thinking behind men’s magazine Port, co-launched with Dan Crowe and Kuchar Swara in 2011 (read our article on the launch issue here).

Willey closed his studio in 2012 – “because I had never intended to be a designer, I had to stop and think about it,” he said. After researching other crafts including woodwork, however, he took on some editorial design jobs, and ended up having the most enjoyable year he had had as a graphic designer in 2013, he said – redesigning the RIBA Journal, guest editing and working on The Independent newspaper (you can read our interview with him about the newspaper’s redesign here), a project that was completed in just three months.

Now working as an art director at the New York Times, Willey said he had never considered himelf a ‘magazine person’, but had learned that magazines can be “wonderful vessels, if done well.” Since joining the title, he has worked on redesigning NY Times magazine. The project was a complete overhaul of its visual language, he said – Matthew Carter has drawn a new version of the logo for online use and Henrik Kubel created 29 typefaces in just four months.

“It’s an extraordinary luxury to be working there – they have a huge art department, and photo department – it’s a big, well-oiled machine,” he said.

Other talks from the final day included Andy Altmann of Why Not Associates, who showcased 27 years of projects from Why Not, from a catalogue for its first client, Next Directory, to typographic ads for Channel 4’s Dispatches, stamps for the 40th anniversary of the Queen’s accession, posters for Saatchi & Saatchi and the Tate and The Truth isn’t sexy, a national campaign to raise awareness of trafficking. He also spoke about the studio’s collaboration with Gordon Young to create Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet (featured in CR here).

Emily Oberman discussed her work for Saturday Night Live, plus campaigns for magazine Jane and a logo created in just three days for the Ebola crisis, while animation studio Cartoon Saloon gave an insight into the making of forthcoming animated Song of the Sea, based on Irish folklore (a project that has taken nine years to create), and Andrew Rae spoke about his illustrations and inspiration.

Images via Matthew Thompson

Photographer Matthew Thompson also presented some lovely photography for Philips headphones, featuring portraits of residents in New York, Los Angeles and London and a campaign for the Dublin Theatre Festival – a project he said designed to reconnect locals with the event by shooting people from around the city in pairs:

And a project documenting the life of Herman Wallace, a black rights activist who was sentenced to 40 years in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary after being wrongly convicted of murder. Without being able to photograph Wallace in prison, Thompson worked with Maria Hinds of Amnesty International to photograph possessions he had accumulated over his time in confinement as well as the street he grew up on (see images from the project here).

Talks should be available on the OFFSET site later this year and dates for next year’s conference have now been announced. For details, see iloveoffset.com

Sagmeister & Walsh has created an elegant visual identity for Fugue, a software product that creates automated cloud infrastructures. The dynamic system is designed to convey “lineage and humanity” without relying on traditional tech imagery, and features an animated logo and graphic patterns generated in response to user data…

A product of US software company Luminal, Fugue creates cloud infrastructure such as servers and security networks using “regenerative component architecture” – in other words, it makes cloud-based systems by constantly generating, destroying and regenerating components in short life cycles, moving data from one place to another in the cloud, a method which allegedly reduces the risk of hacking, configuration drift (inconsistent configuration across computers in a network, which happens due to changes in software or hardware over time), and ‘bit rot’ (the decay of data over time).

Sagmeister & Walsh was asked to create an identity that would reflect the ephemeral nature of the product and developed a script logo constructed from dotted lines which constantly move and regenerate to form the name of the brand. As well as a static version for use on merchandise and in print, the studio has devised an animated logo in which letterforms disappear and reappear as lines regenerate along a given path, visualising how the software works:

Speaking to CR about the identity, Jessica Walsh says the studio was also asked to create a system that would convey a sense of elegance and avoid visuals commonly associated with technology or internet security.

“Fugue wanted to move away from the masculine tech and security graphics that they see often at the trade shows they showcase their software at,” she says. “They wanted the brand to be elegant and stand out against the current tech and security landscape – these were key factors in choosing the color palette and typefaces, which we believe are unusual and unexpected in the industry.”

While the logo’s complexity makes it difficult to read at small sizes, Walsh says this was of little concern to the company, as it will rarely be used in small-scale or on physical products.

“When surveying the media scope for the brand, we found the majority of places they are using [it] are at large sizes: at trade show booths, on large monitors, on tee shirts and tote bags, and on the web,” she says. “There are occasionally times the brand needs to be shown at small sizes and in those instances they use a serif version [shown below] however, it was rare, which allowed us a unique opportunity to design something that works at larger scales,” she adds.

The identity features Grilli Type typeface GT Sectra, which Walsh says was chosen for its contemporary take on calligraphy, while a blue and nude palette echoes the founder’s desire to move away from masculine branding or bolder colours more commonly associated with tech brands.

“GT Sectra is a contemporary serif face that pays homage to the calligraphy of a broad nip pen. When speaking to Fugue, we found that lineage was extremely important to their core values – they wanted to pay respect to the long history of computing their software builds upon – so we wanted a font that was contemporary but also had its roots in history to reflect this philosophy,” she says. “We choose a mono font to accompany GT Sectra that worked well optically for programming code demonstrations for the software,” she explains.

The studio also created a custom application, which allows the company to create patterns and illustrations by importing SVG files (when a line drawing is imported, the application generates visuals in the same style as the logo, such as the icons shown above). Users can then alter size, speed and density to create animations before exporting .tifs or .mov files, and a drawing function in the logo application allows users on tablet devices to draw abstract visuals in the same style as the logo.

An additional application for tech shows and trade fairs, inspired by the company’s name (a musical term referring to themes which are repeated), allows users to import music from their personal library and generate a logo in time to the beat or speed of a particular track.

With its sleek design and subtle features, the identity, at first glance, feels more like one belonging to a fashion or luxury heritage brand than a software firm – it doesn’t look at all like software branding, which is exactly what Sagmeister & Walsh set out to achieve. Creating an identity that mimicks the performance of the product is a clever response to a brief with no obvious visual starting points, and it’s great to see such an inventive approach to branding in an industry which often favours more minimal designs or icon-based systems.

It seems odd not to have created a logo that works in small-scale – or at least, an alternative icon for smaller uses such as online and on social media profiles in the same style as the larger marque – but with no physical products to apply branding to, and most of the company’s presence at events with exhibition stands and digital displays, Walsh says there wasn’t really a need for this. Instead, the studio opted for a flexible visual language based on patterns and abstract symbols.

“When we thought about how people will see their brand, it would be either online or at a trade show event where they give out merchandise. So the most important thing for us was creating a visual language that worked optimally across those media where people see it most often,” she adds.

The large-scale logo is the company’s official marque, she says, and the serif word marque will likely be limited to use on pencils, the back of business cards and as a placeholder on the company’s website. For other small-scale uses such as stickers and letterheads, Walsh says the company will use abstract visuals in the same style as the logo, as shown in business cards above. “The idea was for the graphic language to be recognisable but dynamic and always changing (like the software), so the graphics used are always different,” she adds.

Aware matches a wristband worn at night with a smartphone app to manage, monitor and improve sleep. It features in the Design Museum’s AXA PPP Health Tech & You show alongside other healthcare devices and services

Wearable devices linked to online systems and clinicians could put designers at the heart of a revolution in healthcare. As the AXA PPP Health Tech & You exhibition launches at the Design Museum, we ask where this ‘self-care’ movement is taking us and if we are ready for what it means

DuoFertility‘s device, which is worn on the skin, monitors the body to calculate the best time to try to conceive

Released to coincide with the Apple Watch, Apple’s ResearchKit is described as “an open source software framework designed for medical and health research, helping doctors and scientists gather data more frequently and more accurately” from Apple users

We’ve all seen the doom-laden predictions: in the future, the NHS will not be able to cope with the demands being placed upon it. The UK has an ageing population. Some 70% of hospital beds today are occupied by the over-65s. Demand on the NHS will only rise as we live longer, the numbers suffering from chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension increase and our healthcare needs become more complex.

Speaking to The Guardian in January, Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS in England, warned that “If the NHS continues to function as it does now, it’s going to really struggle to cope because the model of delivery and service that we have at the moment is not fit for the future.”

Many healthcare professionals are stressing the need for us to take responsibility for monitoring and managing our healthcare as a means of alleviating the stress on the NHS. At the forefront of this ‘self-care’ revolution are digital devices and services. Already we have seen the rise of consumer ‘wearables’ such as Fitbit and the Nike FuelBand aimed at incentivising us to get fitter or healthier. In 2014, Apple launched its HealthKit platform for developers. At the time of writing, it has just launched the Apple Watch along with ResearchKit, described as “an open source software framework designed for medical and health research, helping doctors and scientists gather data more frequently and more accurately” from Apple users. But Apple is not the only tech giant betting that healthcare will become a key part of its offering. The likes of Samsung (with its S Health app and Gear Fit wristband), Facebook (with its Moves app) and Google have all been active in the personal health and wellbeing sector.

The Moves app

Alongside these developments by consumer brands, sit a whole range of clinical devices aimed at managing serious conditions such as diabetes, heart problems and drug regimes. And insurance companies are already linking devices and apps to their policies: the Prudential’s Vitality scheme, for example, links its rewards points programme to its members’ use of Moves to monitor how active they are.

In an attempt to put the health technology revolution into a wider context for the benefit of patients and consumers and to bring together some of the most significant developments in this area, health insurance provider AXA PPP healthcare, think-tank 2020Health and the Design Museum have come together to create the AXA PPP Health Tech & You initiative. An exhibition at the Design Museum opens this month featuring 24 shortlisted entries to the AXA PPP Health Tech & You Awards 2015 (all of which can be seen in a supplement out with the April issue of CR) across six different categories.

From Brush DJ

Maria Blyzinsky is the curator and project manager on behalf of the Design Museum of the AXA PPP Health Tech & You exhibition. She explains that innovation in this sphere is being driven both by large organisations such as insurance firms and healthcare providers as well as by individuals with a great idea and, now, the means to develop it. She cites the example of Brush DJ, which features in the Keep Me Healthy category and which has been developed by dentist Ben Underwood. The app motivates toothbrushing for an effective length of time by playing two minutes of music taken at random from a playlist on the user’s device. Brush DJ also allows users to set reminders to brush twice a day, floss, use a mouth-rinse and when next to see their dentist or hygienist. In the same category is a project from a much bigger player – Nuffield’s HealthScore app, which tracks exercise, eating behaviours, body measurements and emotional wellbeing to provide a holistic picture of users’ general health.

Infographic explaining the Nuffield Healthscores app

Blyzinsky notes two trends in terms of designers’ approaches to health tech that are evident in the work chosen for the show. The first, she says, is about “taking an old idea and thinking about how we can make it more useful, more attractive, more prevalent”. The otoscope, for example, is a tool for shining a light inside a patient’s ear and can be found in most GP surgeries. Chosen for the Signs & Symptoms category, Cupris Health have developed an otoscope that connects to a smartphone allowing a patient to send an image of their inner ear to a doctor remotely. “The fact that it’s using standard smartphone tech to do this is a huge leap forward in design terms,” Blyzinsky says. “The potential impact of that on communities that are isolated is enormous. Your GP may not even be in the same country anymore.”

Other designers are approaching issues from the opposite direction, taking a new technology and asking how it can be applied for health and wellbeing. BleepBleeps, for example, takes the principles behind the internet of things and applies them to create ‘tools, technology and content that help everyone become a great parent’.

The BleepBleeps range

As the adoption of both consumer and clinical health tech services and devices becomes more widespread, our relationship with the medical profession will change fundamentally. “Traditionally, our relationship with our GP has been patriarchical,” notes Blyzinsky. “We go along to the surgery, say ‘it hurts here’ and wait for them to wave a magic wand and make us better. Health tech changes that relationship and some GPs will be more adaptable to that than others.”

2020Health’s director of operations Gail Beer agrees. “The way we practice medicine now is very much that the clinician is in control,” she says. “[The rise of health tech] will fundamentally change that relationship because the individual will have much more information at their fingertips about their health and will be able to have a much more objective dialogue with their clinician, rather than just taking the information or advice offered. It makes it more of a joint decision and that represents a real challenge to clinicians who are not used to working in that way.”

Already, many of us Google our symptoms before we set foot in the GP’s surgery but health tech offers much more than that. “This is about a much deeper understanding about your health,” Beer says. “It’s about you having hard data about yourself – your signs, symptoms and responses to how you feel.” Armed with that knowledge, we can have a proactive rather than a reactive relationship to our health, becoming partners with our clinicians rather than expecting them to do everything for us.

“It’s about monitoring what you need to monitor [rather than overwhelming yourself with too much data],” Beer says. “Are you eating the right diet? Taking the right number of steps each day? If you’ve got a long-term condition, you will probably already have been monitoring that on paper: health tech devices make life much easier and give you instant feedback. If you are a diabetic, for instance, it’s less invasive, instant advice.”

But can we trust that advice? Beer points out that many clinical devices are already approved under the Kite-marking and CE quality assurance regimes. Additionally, the Health Technology Assessment programme examines the appropriateness and viability of devices for use in the NHS.

iHealth Align claims to be the world’s smallest mobile glucometer

In the near future, we may see health and wellbeing devices being prescribed to us by our doctors. Keogh told the Guardian that “I see a time where someone who’s got heart failure because they’ve had a previous heart attack is sitting at home and wearing some unobtrusive sensors, and his phone goes, and it’s a health professional saying: ‘Mr Smith, we’ve been monitoring you and we think you’re starting to go back into heart failure. Someone’s going to be with you in half an hour to give you some diuretics’.”

But is our health service ready for what this will mean? Is the NHS going to develop its own devices? Logic, and its track record when it comes to IT suggests not. Which means enabling the health service to work with the data being collected by an individual’s own devices from private providers. Again, keeping in mind the fact that hospitals can’t even access your GP record at present, the idea that the NHS will be able to collect, collate and interpret such data seems remote in the extreme.

Just how far we currently are from this future was revealed when, last November, the health minister Jeremy Hunt set out the Government’s first steps toward a personalised, digital future for the NHS. From April, individuals will be able to book GP appointments online and order repeat prescriptions without having to go to their local surgery. By 2020, with a patient’s consent, their ‘electronic care record’ will be accessible by clinicians across the entire health and care system.

In NHS terms, that’s real progress, but it is a world away from digitally-enabled self-care. “[The widespread adoption of self-care] requires a shift in the way the NHS delivers care,” Beer says. “At the moment, I don’t think the NHS is prepared for that change. Perhaps in a hundred years’ time, we might look back and see this as the start of democratising the NHS and care but a lot needs to happen before we get to that point.”

Wellbeing app from the babylon digital healthcare system

Perhaps a more fundamental question is ‘do we want to get to that point’? This tech-led, ‘self-care’ revolution has exciting potential but, as with everything to do with the NHS, there will be suspicions that it will be accompanied by, or be a mechanism for, cost-cutting and creeping privatisation. And what if the model turns from incentivising and encouraging to using our data for penalising and punishing us? Insurance companies may currently be using health apps to reward members, but what if they start using them to push up premiums for those who haven’t completed their mandatory 5,000 steps a day?

Shiny health teach apps are all very well for the young and affluent, but what many people want out of their health service first and foremost is to be able to see their GP without waiting three weeks. Self-care’s proponents would argue that the widespread adoption of health tech will free up resources to allow better access to GPs and better care for the vulnerable. The UK government has declared that, “Technology will play a vital role in helping contribute to the £22 billion in efficiency savings needed to sustain the NHS”.

That ‘we can’t carry on as we are’ seems inarguable. Health Tech & You is a very valuable starting point for the debate about how and how much health tech (and the creative community) will contribute to a sustainable future for the NHS and for healthcare worldwide.

The AXA PPP Health Tech & You exhibition is at the Design Museum, London SE1 until April 26, see designmuseum.org

The April print issue of CR will focus on creativity in health and will include a supplement detailing all the AXA PPP Health Tech & You Awards winners