A unique aspect of the DHI, and a factor differentiating it from similar institutions, is the role played by design and in particular, design innovation across the portfolio of activity.
As a founding partner, the Glasgow School of Art has embedded design and creative practice as a differentiating capability within the organisation. How the DHI engages with citizens to understand and define requirements is a design-driven activity, allowing for the development of scalable, adoption-ready solutions using an approach that is person-centered rather than technology driven.
The design team, who come from a range of backgrounds, are engaged throughout the innovation pipeline and across all DHI activity. Throughout the development process, the practice of developing artefacts, interactions, and experiences is used to elicit knowledge, incorporate individual and social experience as well as to acknowledge observable behaviours and processes. This activity is undertaken in pursuit of goals that often cannot be defined at a project's outset, a common challenge associated with complex health and well-being projects.
The effectiveness of a design-driven engagement approach can be seen in projects of varying sizes across the full portfolio of activity. From projects with local government exploring how digital technology and design can support transformative care for people living with frailty through collaborations with a major pharma company, a participatory design approach is being used to collaborate with partners to define the scope and inform future services.
The DHI will continue to explore and extend the role of design in defining, design-led innovation through structured collaboration with others, generating research output and solution concepts that can be adopted and integrated at various touchpoints across the health and care spectrum delivering the right digital solutions that allow services and industry to get better ready for scale - ‘Transforming great ideas into real solutions’.
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