Tri-design: Coordination between healthcare, design, and regulatory communities

Abstract

This paper discusses the approaches undertaken by organizations, coordination between healthcare, design, and regulatory communities, to respond to the needs of the COVID-19 crisis and bring about models for agile innovation and disease mitigation. The COVID-19 Design Innovation team was born at the core of a major university to operate as a hub for innovation. In an effort to connect designers, makers, and healthcare professionals, the initiative converged with the main motivation to organize collective efforts to assist in managing the crisis and deliver creative design innovations related to those efforts. Several products were brought about through the initiative efforts: Off the shelf solutions and community driven, hybrid prototyping (reutilizing parts), distributed manufacturing, material investigations, and rapid prototyping that turned labs into manufacturing facilities. As solutions reached refinement and healthcare called for volume, solutions were brought to the community as a rapid response to the crisis. Limits of time and production posed challenges, the crisis catalyzed the coordinated efforts to form agile networks of stakeholders working towards a common goal, hacking the COVID-19 crisis by design.