Hasta La Ideas

The AmoeBAND is a bionic concept for band aid. The design features strategic cut-outs so that you can shape it to fit fingers in such a way that it is easy to bend them and not disrupt the bandage. It even features an intelligent dressing material allows you to regularly check wounds from the outside, without upsetting the healing process. Since the bandage material used exudes a leather-like feel, availability in different skin-tones helps it blend in, without overly highlighting the injury.

As the designers explain, “According to research, the when an infection of a wound is detected, the pH value is between 6.5 and 8.5. AmoeBAND’s indicator cross turns purple, alerting the user needs to change it immediately.”

Even the packaging has been redesigned to a matchbox style and even includes Braille instructions!

AmoeBAND is a 2012 IDEA Award Finalist.

Designers: Tay Pek-Khai, Hsu Hao-Ming, Tsai Cheng-Yu, Chen Kuei-Yuan, Chen Yi-Ting, Lai Jen-Hao, Ho Chia-Ying, Chen Ying-shan, Weng Yu-Ching and Chung Kuo-Ting

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(Better Bandaging was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Revital Cohen on the design of “artificial biology”

Repurposing a retired greyhound racer as a human respirator or a pet sheep as a human dialysis machine represent the type of concepts that irreparably change your understanding of what design can do. How about an electricity-generating human organ that can be implanted to replace the appendix? Such is London-based designer Revital Cohen’s specialization: pushing the applications of design into the realm of what seems like science fiction, holding back just before it leaves reality. Fictional ideas might be all too easy to dismiss as flights of fancy, but Cohen does not just pluck them from the sky—hers are consciously based on the newest scientific research.

A 2008 RCA Design Interactions graduate, Cohen is now in the process of establishing a collaborative studio with partner and fellow graduate Tuur van Balen. Over the past four years, her work has been included in seminal exhibitions, such as MoMA’s Talk To Me exhibition in 2011 and the Why Design Now? triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt in 2010.

Her most recent work, The Immortal, entails a dialysis machine, heart-lung machine, infant incubator, chemical ventilator and a cell saver all hooked up to each other in a seamless exchange of air and “blood” (salty water for these purposes). We recently asked Cohen about this project and more. See the interview below.

The Immortal has been in the making for quite a few years now, where did it all begin?

It started as a thought experiment and has now become a reality. I have been fascinated in these objects since my Life Support Project . They are so meaningful but we never see them unless we use them, which means we never really discuss them in the context of material culture or design — how they are designed, by whom and what their design problems are. They are one of the most important and significant things we will ever use but they never get much attention beyond the engineering and technicality. I wanted to do this experiment to make people see these things and think about these machines.

Your fascination with these objects also comes out in your video, The Posthuman Condition. Are these projects related?

Actually the video is the research that became Life Support Project and was shot in a dialysis ward in a hospital. These stories first inspired the Life Support Project. Secondly it made me think that there are these objects that live secret lives, which normally people don’t ever see. That stayed with me and has now become The Immortal. As a designer it is interesting to think not only about redesigning these objects and how they are made, but also about the stories they tell.

What are the stories being told in The Immortal?

For one thing, these particular machines tell the story about how we perceive our bodies in Western culture. For example, this type of machine has never been invented in China because in Chinese medicine, their perception of the body is completely different. The machines in The Immortal emphasise that Western medicine sees the circle of life to be the heart and lungs. We completely ignore the digestive system. Chinese medicine looks at the body on a more chemical level and places a huge emphasis on the digestive system.

So these objects really tell social and cultural stories. They are also objects that make us think about ethics and questions of prolonging life, cheating death, living an artificial life, euthanasia, living on machines when electricity consumption is bad for the planet… They just have so much grey area surrounding them.

You have described this project as “artificial biology”. What does that mean?

These machines reflect human attempts at biology. However it can’t really be done through mechanics or, if it is done through mechanics, it is so removed from anything that is biological. The installation takes up a whole room and it’s not even all the functions we carry in our little bodies everywhere. When we try to replicate biology, it’s amazing how complicated things have to be.

What really interests me is the point of connection between the natural and the artificial — how we try to design organic things using artificial materials and how we try to control nature. All of the tools we have are designed — everything in our houses, as well as our cars and even roads. Once we have the tools to design the natural world, the question is how will we apply our artificial tools to biological material?

Would you ever redesign the actual medical life support machines?

I have thought about that as a potential future project. Maybe, but at the moment for me it’s more about telling a story that makes the audience come out of the room thinking about these questions and objects.

What are the applications and purpose of your design practice?

That’s something I’m reviewing all the time. It’s always been to inspire people. To keep myself interested by asking questions I don’t know the answer to. To explore the nature of objects and the design of biology.

Design biology is still a very conceptual thing to look into, but it is going to become a reality in years to come. What my and Tuur van Balen’s studio’s work will engage with are the implications of these new applications, imagining how they will be used and looking into the grey areas of designing bodies, biology and nature, and the meaning of nature whether designed or not. We’re trying to bring these questions up and make them part of the design debate.

If you want industrial design glory, you probably dream of pulling the sheets off of your furniture designs at Milan or the ICFF in New York. It’s a minority of young designers who are determined to make a difference in the medical design field, who dream of presenting at the Medical Design & Manufacturing Conference in Philly. But each year that latter conference, now in its 30th year, draws thousands of manufacturers, designers, engineers, R&D guys, and materials experts all dedicated to producing devices that extend and repair human health.

In this first video from MD&M, IDEO’s Brian Mason and Stacey Chang (Medical Products Lead Designer and Director of Healthcare Practice, respectively) discuss their approach to medical device design and explain how the peculiarities of the field dictate that creativity has to happen in the early stages of the process:

At this year’s conference a company called Secant Medical’s Vice President of Advanced Technologies, Jeffrey M. Koslosky, will deliver a talk on his company’s specialty, Biomedical Textiles in Implantable Medical Devices. “Biomedical textiles can transform medical device engineers’ design portfolios to create truly innovative and market-leading devices,” says Koslosky. Secant’s expertise is highly specialized, as they focus on the development of materials that need to reside within the human body. In the video below, Secant design engineer Amy Woltman shows and discusses some of these materials (starts at 0:53):

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A modular toolbelt cut down on the Nurses need to practice hand hygiene by making her tools more accessible but it nevertheless made her movement more restricted. Images and Article by Rachel Lehrer

The best part of any design process is seeing your ideas touch the real world. Prototypes bring queries and hypothesis to life. They show things that in retrospect seem obvious but in prospect are entirely unexpected. After 7 months spent researching hand hygiene compliance in a hospital, I was finally able to walk through the rotating doors and unveil a design under the expectant gaze of the nurse who was going to experience it all day.

My past life as a dancer has made my design process movement-driven. In health care, this translates to a focus on understanding the physical roadblocks to peak performance. I’m a physical therapist for environments; our bodies are our inescapable collaborators. Through enactments, observing the subtle nuances of movement and through physically knowing the process of “hardwiring” movement rituals, I’ve been able to look at physical behaviors and spatial intention from the strategic vantage point of the body.

In my previous article on hand hygiene, I established a series of movement lenses for increasing hand hygiene compliance in a hospital—movement scripts, muscle memory, environmental ergonomics. Now the resulting hypotheses have been tested. Each intervention utilizes my movement driven perspective but also challenges the institutional reliance on quantitative proof and bottom-line driven decisions that make experimenting and designing in a hospital almost ironic. In a place that relies on proven discrete solutions, the messiness, questioning and experimentation of a design process must win its right to be there. It’s an understatement to say that a design practice—always questioning the real culprit, always probing, always wondering if there might be a better way—makes the hospital status quo nervous.

PROVOKING AND INSCRIBING

You can’t change someone’s behavior before you understand it and so I began my research phase by observing the nurses, whose behavior I hoped to change, and the Infection Prevention and Control staff, who wanted me to change the behavior. At a well-attended meeting with leaders from multiple departments, I presented a provocation. I wanted those who control the dialogue and data around hand hygiene to feel what consistent hand hygiene compliance was like.

For 4 hours on a cold day, the Infection Prevention and Control staff practiced hand hygiene every 6 minutes and hated every second of it. Nurses, though, have to practice hand hygiene, on average, every 6 minutes for their entire 12 hour shifts. I was looking to increase empathy, to get the rule makers to understand what following the rules feels like. The value of this type of intervention is not in increasing compliance numbers or in spurring the drafting of a new mission statement but in re-inscribing the problem on the stressed bodies of those that oversee compliance. In a bottom line driven atmosphere, it is important to remind those at desks that hundreds of unique human factors are involved in increasing compliance. It is a complex problem that can’t be resolved by adding more signs that simply restate the goal in bigger type. Before the hospital gets clean hands, it must get its own dirty (and dry and itchy) too.

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The central design flaw of a wheelchair becomes apparent during egress and ingress: A user that can only support themselves using their arms must insert themselves into the chair backwards. If you think about it this makes very little sense, and from a design standpoint it’s a clear example of a user having to suit themselves to the object as opposed to the other way around.

The TEK Robotic Mobilization Device, in contrast, is designed for paraplegics to “enter” from a more natural, frontal position. After first seeing the device I thought it too robotic-looking, but after seeing the video I’m convinced of its design improvements over a wheelchair:

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