A Co-Design Tool for Medical Product Development

A Co-Design Tool for Medical Product Development

Pobuda, Alex (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering)

Albayrak, A. (mentor)
Diehl, J.C. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology

Integrated Product Design

2023-08-24

The client of this graduation project, Dune Innovation, aims to facilitate and execute a structured design process for medical device development. This is a complex task most notably during the early ‘discover’ phase, or fuzzy front end. In medical device development, the first stages of the design process are crucial in ensuring the adoption chances of a new product. During the discover phase, the focus is to gather design inputs or requirements to reduce the uncertainty and risk in future project development. By logic, Dune Innovation does not have sufficient knowledge on all design criteria to solve these uncertainties. Therefore, the company seeks interaction with stakeholders to find unknown design inputs that can help to make progress. To do so, the intention is to organize meetings or interviews with these stakeholders. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Stakeholders in the medical field often are short on time and don’t prioritize collaboration with Dune Innovation. Even if they manage to make time, standard interview methods are suboptimal for creativity and exploration. This struggle leads to ongoing uncertainties and longer lead times in projects.

This thesis project delivers a new approach to interview settings during the discover phase of medical device development for Dune Innovation. This is achieved by developing a tool which embraces co-design strategies during stakeholder interview settings. By providing transparency on the clients’ design process towards the interviewee, the desired effect is to increase engagement, improve the quality of discussion and outputs. The goal of the session is to generate new design inputs together with the interviewee that are relevant for the projects design process. The concept of the co-design tool is based on these issues and aims to enable a structured co-design session between a facilitator and a stakeholder in a physical interview setting. The tool offers a functionality that should help in reaching a shared understanding between both parties, as a foundation for the following co-design sessions. The tool should engage participants to actively contribute their expertise, insights, and ideas during a 90-minute interview session, with the goal to generate new inputs for the project. The printable design of the tool encourages the use of pens and post-it’s to spark design thinking and creativity.

Validation rounds showed a great potential of the tool. All participants shared their enthusiasm after concluding a session. It showed that during use of the tool participants were engaged for the entire length of the session. Both the facilitators and interviewees had enjoyable experiences. The validation rounds proved that shared understanding could be reached within 15 minutes. Validation also showed that the tool encourages sketching, writing, and unexpected discussion, which led to new design inputs for the client. Although more testing Is necessary, the concept shows great value for future implementation.

medical design
co-design
stakeholder engagement
stakeholder collaboration
Visual communication design
fuzzy front end
Complex problems

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8c94e002-06fe-47c8-bed5-3c22b29cb5cd

Student theses

master thesis

© 2023 Alex Pobuda