Health Design Thinking, second edition: Creating Products and Services for Better Health

A practice-based guide to applying the principles of human-centered design to real-world health challenges; updated and expanded with post–COVID-19 innovations.
 

This book offers a practice-based guide to applying the principles of human-centered design to real-world health challenges that range from drug packaging to breast cancer detection. Written by pioneers in the field—Bon Ku, a physician leader in innovative health design, and Ellen Lupton, an award-winning graphic designer—the book outlines the fundamentals of design thinking and highlights important products, prototypes, and research in health design. This revised and expanded edition describes innovations developed in response to the COVID-19 crisis, including an intensive care unit in a shipping container, a rolling cart with intubation equipment, and a mask brace that gives a surgical mask a tighter seal.
 
The book explores the special overlap of health care and the creative process, describing the development of such products and services as a credit card–sized device that allows patients to generate their own electrocardiograms; a mask designed to be worn with a hijab; improved emergency room signage; and a map of racial disparities and COVID-19. It will be an essential volume for health care providers, educators, patients, and designers who seek to create better experiences and improved health outcomes for individuals and communities.
 

Included in Fast Company's "14 most important books for designers to read right now."

"Presented in practical, approachable prose, it offers context, methods, and case studies sourced from the medical community, such as a hand-held device for detecting breast cancer or a clothing line with functional openings that people with chronic illnesses can wear during medical procedures. Graphics by Lupton’s longtime collaborator Jennifer Tobias bring the ideas to life."
—Architectural Digest

"Ku’s medical perspectives and Lupton’s sensitivities to the history and future of design take the reader on an entertaining journey that is not only fun, with one-liners inserted with surgical precision, but, with an abundance of case studies to illustrate their message, it is also very educational."
—Health Environments Research and Design Journal

"The healthcare system is ripe with challenges and opportunities for innovation. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted this issue more than ever. If you’re a designer working in healthcare, or interested in understanding how design is being used in a healthcare context, this book is for you. The book is filled with real-world projects and examples of applying design to health."
—Thinking Design

Bon Ku, MD, a practicing emergency physician, is Marta and Robert Adelson Professor of Medicine and Design at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, where he is also Director of the Health Design Lab. Ellen Lupton is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, and Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the author of Beautiful Users, Design Is Storytelling, The Senses: Design Beyond Design, and other books.