How creativity in product design and public communication in healthcare is key to achieving a defining social mission of our age
In the same year Abby.World won a D&AD Black Pencil in Product Design for its innovative Heartbeat Drum Machine, a promotional tool for The Swedish Heartchild Foundation, 12 new subcategories were added to the Health & Wellbeing categories in the D&AD Awards. Multiple works, from diabetes management to the supply of contraception were awarded. Here, Jeremy Myerson unpacks why creative minds turning their skills to innovation in this space is so important.
Jeremy Myerson is Professor Emeritus in the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art, which he co-founded in the 1990s and where he led many research projects in healthcare and inclusive design. He is the co-author, with Graham Vickers, of Rewind: Forty Years of Design & Advertising (Phaidon Press, 2002), which tells the story of four decades of the D&AD Awards.
Improving universal standards of healthcare is one of the defining social missions of our age. As a global challenge, the need for better health sits right up there alongside climate change, an ageing society and the effects of AI and automation in terms of its scale and impact; and it has an intricate connection with all three.
What makes the global health mission so challenging is the sheer pressure on healthcare systems around the world. Governments everywhere are currently struggling with rising costs, resistance to drugs and rocketing demand amid population growth, migration, urbanisation and overcrowding. That’s before you even factor in the spread of highly infectious diseases, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, and staggeringly high rates of burnout among healthcare professionals.
“Against a global background of increasing strain – with a ‘sick-care’ model exacerbated by environmental degradation, pollution and an ageing population requiring medical support – the need for innovation in healthcare is now critical.”
Attempts to pivot from prevention of illness to promotion of healthier living have been hampered in many countries by outdated thinking and outmoded infrastructures, focused on fixing people when they are broken rather than keeping them fit and healthy. When the National Health Service in the UK marked its 75th anniversary in June 2023, it was less a moment of celebration than a catalyst for much agonised soul-searching about its future – how the system might be re-booted and funded differently, and what the revised reach of a new-look NHS should be.
Against a global background of increasing strain – with a ‘sick-care’ model exacerbated by environmental degradation, pollution and an ageing population requiring medical support – the need for innovation in healthcare is now critical. Artificial intelligence and digital diagnostics systems are fast transforming many clinical areas. But the underlying challenge cannot be met by new technology alone. Creativity in product design and public communication is also required to advance a health-inducing model, which is where the design and advertising communities engaging with D&AD Awards come in.
In the past, healthcare was very much seen as a specialist domain, especially when it came to designing medical equipment, hospitals or health campaigns. There were specialist groups that covered that kind of thing, and most designers steered well clear of such an ‘expert’ or ‘niche’ area. Happily, that state of affairs no longer exists: as the 2023 D&AD Awards attest, creatives of all stripes are fully engaged with a wide range of healthcare subjects – and producing some outstanding work as a result.
Heartbeat Drum Machine, Abby.World
There should be no surprise, then, that the highest D&AD accolade, the Black Pencil, should be earned by a healthcare product entry, Heartbeat Drum Machine. This is a stunning piece of communication on behalf of the The Swedish Heartchild Foundation, which programmes the heartbeats of four children with different heart defects into ‘a drum machine with congenital heart disease’. Artists can then make music based on electrocardiogram (ESG) beats decoded into a sequencer. Produced by Swedish agency Abby.Wood with audiovisual artist Love Hultén, this campaign aims to pull at the heartstrings of potential donors to the charity by transforming the cold data of medical science into a compelling musical experience.
HeimatTBWA\’s Sun Warning Flag is a further brilliant example of transformative design thinking. This is health prevention in action: a graphic device that warns beachgoers when UV radiation has reached a critical level. It is backed up by a campaign from German Cancer Aid, reminding everyone that eight times the number of people die from skin cancer than die from drowning. The Sun Warning Flag has now joined the repertoire of identifiable flags warning about sea conditions and is set for worldwide rollout through the relevant international bodies.
Sun Warning Flag, HeimatTBWA\
Other shortlisted and winning healthcare entries for D&AD Product Design are less visceral and more scientific, but no less rewarding in terms of human impact. Serviceplan Korea and Germany’s Dot Pad. The First Smart Tactile Graphics Display, uses dot image processing and actuator technology to create a potential game-changer in tactile communication for visually impaired people; making visual content from any source accessible. The Cure Cup from 21GRAMS New York turns a traditional menstrual cup into a device for preserving stem cells, thus expanding researchers’ access to them.
The Anti-Air Pollution Face Mask is an elegant, practical device by Realise Product Design and Brunel University for Airhead, aimed at anyone from cyclists to traffic wardens who are moving around outdoors in polluted cities. And Dexcom’s G7 Continuous Glucose Monitoring System frees people with diabetes from the endless and painful rounds of finger-pricking, instead sending blood sugar scores to a smart phone and data insights to a clinical team to monitor the condition. As a Type 1 diabetic, I know all about the value of this system, I could spend the rest of this article eulogising about its life-changing design – but I won’t.
What these shortlisted and award-winning designs tell us, in their different ways, about the future of healthcare, is that it will increasingly be about lifestyle and prevention rather than sickness and cure. It will be about living well with various chronic conditions, as well as avoiding them. There’s something oddly thrilling about the way the creative imagination of artists and designers has locked onto subjects as diverse as skin cancer, heart defects in children, diabetes monitoring, stem cell research and the effects of urban pollution. And I didn’t mention yet the Breast Cancer Simulator Pad from Sabina and VMLY&R Thailand, which turns every bra into a breast cancer detector.
“There’s something oddly thrilling about the way the creative imagination of artists and designers has locked onto subjects as diverse as skin cancer, heart defects in children, diabetes monitoring, stem cell research and the effects of urban pollution.”
Just in case you might be thinking that the embrace of healthcare issues by D&AD Awards is an entirely new one, a sift through the archives will reveal that more than 50 years ago, a startup agency by the name of Saatchi & Saatchi started producing some memorable campaigns for the Health Education Council in the UK. First, in 1970, under the Cramer Saatchi name, came the famous Pregnant Man, featuring a cushion stuffed up a man’s jumper and the immortal line: would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant? The following year, with Saatchi & Saatchi firmly established, Charles Saatchi himself wrote an anti-smoking campaign which won Black Pencil for Copy, revealing what even mild nicotine poisoning does to us: Why Your First Cigarette Made You Feel Giddy.
Shocking stuff on one level, but it was tame compared to what would come 14 years later: Natural Born Smoker was FCO’s commercial for the Central Office of Information, directed by Barry Myers. This was aimed at teenagers, showing a grotesque future smoker with every body function and feature distorted to absorb nicotine. This too won two Yellow Pencils in 1986, a vintage year for advertising.
Perhaps, when design historians look back at the D&AD archives from some future vantage point, 2023 will be recognised as a vintage year for healthcare design. While the overarching challenge of improving global health remains menacing, multi-faceted and at times overwhelming – much like the climate crisis – we should not forget that small amounts of creativity and design innovation can take us a very long way. We have this year’s D&AD Awards to thank for reminding us of that.