HEDI: An online platform for healthcare engineering design and innovation

Abstract

Healthcare is a specialized sector in which products and service provision are embedded with professional requirements that are unfamiliar to most of the designers, and different stakeholders have quite different knowledge backgrounds, viewpoint of concerns, working styles, etc. which make the communication and innovation among them complex and difficult. The Design Council in UK launched a free-to-access online EBCD (Experience Based Co-Design) toolkit to facilitate designers working closely with healthcare providers and patients in design process. In the College of Design and Innovation (D&I) of Tongji University in China, we are planning to establish an online platform based on the EBCD methodology to promote effective and efficient communication among different parties in healthcare design and innovation (healthcare providers, engineers, designers, patients, etc.) to encourage idea generating and sharing. In this paper, the functionality of the platform as well as some experience we obtained from the EBCD practice will be presented.