Healthcare Design Dynamics + Design Team Formation with Steve Reay — DT101 E25

Welcome to the Design Thinking 101 Podcast! I'm Dawan Stanford, your host. Today I'm interviewing Steve Reay. Steve is currently director of Good Health Design, a collaborative design studio at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. He is affiliated with the Designers Institute of New Zealand. Steve's research focuses on how the design of products and services may have a positive impact on people's health and well-being.

Today we explore Steve's path from scientist to his role as the director of Good Health Design. Good Health Design enables designers to engage with clinical experts, healthcare professionals as well as researchers from other disciplines, to share and test ideas and develop unique solutions. We dive deep into team creation, what factors are important in team creation and which details are important particularly in the healthcare industry.

SSteve and I talk about the reality of design thinking in healthcare, what makes the most successful projects successful, and how one of the factors to a successful project is how people work together. The type of time it takes in order to build a successful team.

We'll also dig into his project, Initiate.Collaborate: a new collaborative project can often feel like stepping into the unknown with an ongoing learning curve, a clash of worlds and perspectives within constraining systems and structures. Initiate.collaborate is a card game that is fun and enables responsive and responsible collaborations.

Learn More About Today's Guest

Steve Reay's Profile
Initiate.Collaborate
Design for Health & Wellbeing Lab
Good Health Design

In This Episode

[01:43] We hear about Steve's background, and his experiences which led to where he is today.
[02:58] What Steve carried over from his career as a scientist to his career as a designer.
[04:21] Steve's first projects in the healthcare space.
[07:42] How Steve finds the right people for his project teams.
[09:26] Relationships and how they make successful projects.
[12:07] Steve's advice on what to look for when creating a design team in the healthcare organization team.
[14:35] What different qualities design teams should have to be successful.
[18:37] Bringing community work into the healthcare field and working in community projects.
[22:38] Steve's thoughts on design thinking in relationship to design thinking and discipline formation.
[29:29] What Steve is exploring with design thinking.
[33:12] Steve's relationship with his students and how he views the learning journey.
[37:02] An example of how Steve's team worked on design thinking with a client and using a co-design process.
[45:54] The excitement which comes along with the initial phase of design thinking.
[49:16] Resources Steve uses with his design thinking lab.

Links and Resources

Design Thinking at Work
The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon
Innovation with Information Technologies in Healthcare