Interactions - May/June 2010

FORUM On MODELIng
seem frighteningly foreign. Yet this transition
offers the opportunity to make the world richer—
to create more options for everyone, including
professional designers (and HCPs and teachers).
intersection of health and computing, design and
service. What will we invent as these processes
converge? What happens when health self-man-
agement meets meta-design?

About the Authors Hugh Dubberly manages a consultancy focused on making services and software easier to use through interaction design and information design. As vice president, he was responsible for design and production of Netscape’s Web services. For 10 years he was at

Apple, where he managed graphic design and corporate identity and co-created the Knowledge Navigator series of videos. Dubberly also founded an interactive media department at Art Center and has taught at CMU, II T/ID, San Jose State, and Stanford.

design for health
As healthcare becomes a larger part of the
economy and as healthcare practice and research
biology both converge with computing, opportu-
nities to design software and services for health
abound. We should keep in mind that health is a
means to a goal—one of the things that supports
the quality of our everyday living.
Designers should ask their clients: How should
we frame health in this engagement? Are we
bound to the frame of traditional healthcare?
Or can we apply a broader frame, such as self-
management?
Designers should also ask themselves and
their colleagues: How should we frame design in
this engagement? Are we designing artifacts or
services? Where might we create opportunities
for users to design?
If the user is both designer and implementer
(combining first- and second-order agency), what
is possible? How can we help users act? Track
results? Set goals? How do we “scaffold” tiny self-
experiments, learning, and sharing?
Designers should also help users discover and
understand both the short-term relationship
between action and result (incremental changes
that the individual can actually make) and the
long-term consequences (big outcomes that mat-
ter over time).
Creating opportunities for users to design
requires not only giving them responsibility for
means and goals but also enabling conversations
for:
• overcoming the barriers (bio-cost) of making
incremental change through...
• making results, trends, and projections vis-
ible and...
• providing emotional support (such as family
and community engagement) to maintain...
• higher-level strategic views of the entire pro-
cess, to maintain goals and momentum, that in
turn…
• create learning across time and circumstanc-
es that can be shared…
• improving the system for others
We’re on the brink of something new—the

Rajiv Mehta consults on exploring and commercial-
izing radical innovation, driving ideas from concept
to market. His work has ranged from photography
to lasers, computer vision to wireless, and health,
at companies from Adobe and Apple to Symbol
Technologies and Zume Life. He studied at
Shelley Evenson recently joined Microsoft’s FUSE
(Future Social Experience) Labs as a principal in
user experience design. Before FUSE she was an
associate professor teaching interaction design at
Carnegie Mellon University. Evenson taught cours-
es in designing conceptual models, interaction,
Paul Pangaro is the CTO at CyberneticLifestyles.
com in New York City, most recently working for cli-
ents in consumer internet and mobile computing.
He has designed a search engine for poetry, inter-
active information strategies for medical services,
May + June 2010

and service design, and collaborated in projects with colleagues from the Tepper School of Business and the Human Computer Interaction Institute. She jumpstarted the study of service design in the U.S.—designing courses, energizing students, and hosting the first international conference on service design-emergence. Before joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, Evenson worked for more than 25 years in multidisciplinary consulting practices, working with on a wide variety of design and development projects.

and a framework of ontogenetic sharing for social networking. Pangaro has lectured at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture, São Paulo’s Instituto Itaú Cultural, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, and MI T’s Media Lab and Sloan School of Management on design process, conversation theory applied to interaction design, and the cybernetics of innovation. He was CTO of several startups, including Idealab’s Snap.com, and was senior director and distinguished market strategist at Sun Microsystems. He has taught at Stanford University and teaches in the MFA program on interaction design at the School of Visual Arts, New York City.