BIG NEWS
After almost five successful and enjoyable years of consulting, I’m taking a full-time position with the largest hospital chain on the west coast. Working as a product manager in this environment, I will be actively envisioning and managing the delivery of innovative new products & services to benefit people’s well-being and improve the experience and outcomes of healthcare delivery. I’ve always been passionate about helping to solve complex medical-related challenges. Bringing my user experience design tools and techniques to the business of product creation will help disseminate powerful user-centered approaches within a vital industry. I’m also excited to expand my professional skill-set to function ever more effectively at the crucial intersection of product desirability, technical feasibility and business viability.
Devise may be going into “hibernation” as a consultancy, but I’ll continue to keep my eye on important happenings in the arenas of design, business and now most especially healthcare. Read more for the inspiration behind this career progression….
INSPIRATION
One of the key inspirations for my career progression was Cennydd Bowles’ closing plenary at the IA Summit 2011 conference. His talk spread like wildfire in my professional network because he challenged user experience designers to move into more strategic, leadership positions within their organizations — even if this meant leaving behind the title and, more shockingly, core activities of working as a practicing designer. He writes:
“We already meet the job description of the innovative business leader. We’re versatile, happy working with the minutiae of pixels and interactions as well as vision, strategy, and systems. We connect dots that others don’t, examining details across an entire experience. We can discriminate weak signals and hear unvoiced demands. And we have a foot in the multidisciplinary door, with years of experience as translators and arbiters between technologists, users, product teams, and marketers.”
Read the whole piece here: “The Fall and Rise of User Experience”.
Furthermore, we need to recognize that interaction design may comprise the perfect liberal arts foundation for the 21st century. In his paper “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” design educator Dick Buchanan writes: “Designers are exploring concrete integrations of knowledge that will combine theory with practice for new productive purposes, and this is the reason why we turn to design thinking for insight into the new liberal arts of technological culture.”
Seen in this light, design is a disciplined way of identifying and solving problems from user-centered perspectives, informed by a keen awareness of how post-industrial technology could be advancing in ways that jeopardize our ability to relate to others on all-important human dimensions. Maintaining our individual dignity and privacy while yet benefiting from the power of expansive global networks and vast stores of data will be one of the key challenges for healthcare in the coming years. I will be helping my hospital organization to transform data into knowledge — leading to effective healthcare products and services informed by values in keeping with a civil and just society.
Professional roles are blurring and blending, as commented on recently by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Harvard Business Review, and I find myself moving with these shifting and ever-rising tides. I’ll always employ the creative ways of thinking and making that I’ve practiced for the last 13 years as an interaction designer, even as I develop new competencies to help bring good things into being. My trajectory feels like the path of an entrepreneur!
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