D4E1 - The object becomes

What is a hospital?
(Lieven) I think a hospital is a place where people enter or gather to solve or help other people considering their well-being, their health. In the first place, primary health needs are served in a hospital. And it's a complex environment because you have all types of pathologies. 

(Katrien) And it's even more complex if you consider the variety of people: there is a stream of sick people that come in with an expectation of coming out healthier. And then you have the stream of visitors and professionals who work here.

(Lieven) And, also important, there are not only healthcare professionals working here, but you also have a big logistics system that makes the hospital work. Food, as well as the cleaning of the hospital, the maintenance. So, it's really a complex mix of healthcare professionals, logistics people and the general public that enter one building. 

How did you start your practice? 
(Lieven) D4E1 really originated when I read about the story of a graffiti artist in New York – it was 10-12 years ago. Tempt One was his name. He was a very famous graffiti artist who suddenly got diagnosed with ALS. In a couple of months, he was paralyzed and he was sitting in his bed. Suddenly a group of people around him, friends and some paramedics discovered a way to let him draw again because that was his most meaningful activity in life. They hacked an optical mouse and made an iWriter device for $40. At the time that was quite impressive, because most iWriter devices were like 10 times more expensive. And actually, that was also the first time that they put the building plans of that design on the Internet and suddenly, you saw that these iWriter's were popping up in India, in Africa. It was amazing to see that there were no designers involved in that process. And it was a very successful product because it was very low-tech, and it had a very high impact on that person. 

That made us think about how we can use the creative capital of citizens better. They also have powerful ideas, and really know the world where they live, so they can very quickly validate what works and what doesn't work. We, as industrial designers, we're trained to always design products for target groups, big audiences. 

Can you explain the importance of an Open Design approach today?
(Lieven) Open Designers say: 'We don't all need the same product. We have the recipe and we can change it according to our needs and location'. That's a very interesting perspective regarding the user-centeredness of products, but also regarding sustainability, because, with Open Design, you can also repair your products very easily. You can’t do that with industrial design products, because they’re made with techniques that, as a normal citizen, you have no access to. And then we started thinking about the perspective and we came into the world of healthcare. And there, you find this very interesting paradox. You have Universal Design, inclusive design, which is a design strategy where designers want to design as human-centred as possible, and they want to do the best they can to make the products very applicable and efficient. But this way, you regularly run into the paradox that somebody can’t use it. So, then we thought: let's start to design from very specific situations, not from target groups. For example, that person is paralyzed, he wants to use his eyes to make graffiti: let's make it on site and make it happen so that it works. Then, by transferring the building plans into the world, we will be able to see how other people react to it, and how they appropriate it in their local contexts. That's a very exciting way to look at design. We are only able to look at it this way for 20 years now because we needed the internet for that. We needed to spread knowledge very easily and we also needed the FabLab machines. That's actually how we started. 
 

And how do you apply Open Design in your Makerhealth research? 
(Lieven) By making Open Design accessible to nurses, to educators, suddenly you see that people create solutions for problems that we never talked or thought about. It's important that, when we start bottom-up, we can see much better which problems are getting greater support. What do communities really want? Can we connect the patterns much better? Then an industrial designer can tap into that process as we did, and upscale from those patterns. 

(Katrien) Often the word 'designer' or 'industrial designer' makes the wrong connection, because we still usually link it with production, with companies and with more industrial processes. But an industrial designer is more a behaviour, a way of thinking, a way of looking at problems, a way of problem-solving.