Dates: 25th – 29th June, 09:30 – 12:30 & 14:30 – 16:30
Design is no longer the result of a flash of inspiration, exceptions notwithstanding. To respond to the real needs of people, the designer combines intuition and technical skill to empathize with users, navigate ambiguity, and make users’ latent needs tangible. To do that, the designer has to consider aspects such as functionality, aesthetics, human factors, world views, social implications, production, sustainability, and product life cycles.
This workshop provides an opportunity to answer this call. We will focus on Health and Wellness because of its deep connection with both the functional and emotional needs of users, but the tools explored should be generally applicable. Through a study of the human-centered process, we will develop methods to realize a week-long design project framed by user needs and their context. This will include an immersive experience of lectures, hands-on workshops, fieldwork and, potentially, field-trips. Although the class projects will focus on design solutions for Health and Wellness, at the end of the workshop participants should be able to apply user research methods, ideation, rapid prototyping, product design methods, interaction design, and storytelling to solve real world design problems.
José Colucci is the Director of Research & Development of the Design Institute for Health (DIH). Before joining the DIH, José was a Sr. Director and Associated Partner at IDEO, where he worked for 16 years, Vice-President of Research & Development of ITI, developer of high-resolution, pen-based computer interfaces in Canada; and prior to that, he was the General Manager of the Medical Engineering Division at FUNBEC – Brazil’s largest manufacturer of medical electronics for cardiology.
José has a BS in mechanical engineering, an MS in Industrial Design and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a guest lecturer at Harvard, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Olin School of Engineering. Currently he also has a part-time teaching appointment at the University of Texas at Austin.