The Best of the Best

Last Friday night the team glammed up and headed out to the Best Awards.

The lab was stoked to be finalist this year in four categories: graphic design, product design,  public good and interactive design.

After a couple of months of anticipation it was finally time to find out who the best of the best were!

We are so excited and proud to announce how awesome our students did!

Charlotte Dickson's children’s book ‘Lin Breaks her Arm’ was awarded bronze on the night. This was the only student project under public good that was a winner in its category.

Our resident boss cat, Eden Short’s student project‘ Wayfinding for healthcare seeking’ won a silver award in graphic design.

We can’t forget Antonio Wan, with his three piece suit looking pretty dashing on the night. He took home a gold pin for his design “The Little Ones” that he did for his honours project last year. He is currently working on his masters project. Can’t wait to see how it does!

Congratulations to all our students! We are incredibly proud of all your hard work. Also thanks for all the support our students have received to help them towards this great achievement.  

Pharmacy Dispenser

We are always interested in how easily accessible 3D printing technology can be used to solve problems creatively and quickly at the hospital. Some past example of our work in the space can be found here.

Recently a design problem arose in relation to the overly large quantities of prescription medication in wards. A considerable portion of these large quantities often expire. The technician believed that smaller containers with lower quantities may help to prevent this issue.

Doing this manually is far too time consuming for staff, and potentially inaccurate. Medication machines that automated this process are available, but they were deemed as too expensive. A smaller low-cost machine was purchased that automated the measuring process, but still required staff to individually handle each container.

Although the machine could output smaller quantities, the metal chute at the bottom of the device was too wide for smaller containers.  The DHW lab developed a customised 3D printed funnel to improve the functionality of the machine and allow the dispenser to work effectively.

Come study with us!

There are plenty of real world postgraduate research project opportunities for motivated and creative students. Get in touch if you would like an opportunity to research in a collaborative and supportive interdisciplinary space, and help transform society through design.

We have exciting research opportunities for design, health, engineering and computing students who are interested in the Design for Health space.

Want to know more? Email us at dhwlab@gmail.com. 

Objects as Dialogue: Lab for Living

Recently, some of the researchers and designers from the DHW lab spent time in the UK with our colleagues from the Lab for Living in Sheffield. This opportunity arose from the successful Catalyst Seeding Grant: 

Catalyst: Seeding funding is provided by the NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand. This programme is aimed to facilitate new small and medium pre-research strategic partnerships with a view to developing full collaborations that could be supported through Catalyst: Strategic over time.  The application centered around developing the partnership the DHW lab has with Sheffield Hallam University’s Lab4Living, and AUT Centre for Person Centered Research and will explore design opportunities for people living with dementia in hospital and the community. 

One of the specific learnings for us here at the DHW lab was the research they are conducting around 'objects as dialogue' i.e. how objects and exhibited artifacts might facilitate user engagement around a specific social issue or research question and provide valuable inputs to a design process. 

In a session with a community support group for elderly and dementia sufferers, the ‘Exhibition in a Box’ was introduced; a specific discussion topic was given to the group, and in pairs we took turns using an object from the exhibition to interpret the discussion topic.

The ‘Exhibition in a Box’ exercise was developed as a portable version of the successful 2012 ‘Engagingaging’ exhibition; a series of everyday timber furniture pieces modified in some way to provoke discussion about the needs, preferences and aspirations of older people in the home, in order to design better products and services that support independence in later life.

Instead of bringing elderly people to an exhibition, the ‘Exhibition in a Box’ transforms the environment of the elderly person into the exhibit. The product is now being used across Europe by clinicians looking for creative new ways to connect with their elderly patients.

Engaging Aging Exhibition

Engaging Aging Card Deck.

Learn about our Illustrator_Emma Scheltema

Over the next little while we will be doing feature articles on our postgrad students. This is a chance to learn a bit more about them and what they have been doing at the lab.  

This week the spotlight is on our honours student – Emma Scheltema. Emma has a Bachelor of Science (Ecology and Conversation) along with currently doing her Bachelor of Design Honours with a focus on medical illustration.

Illustrations of the heart (showing the Fontan procedure) as part of an honours project looking into the effective design of medical illustrations for different users in the hospital. 

Emma’s primary focus is to create illustrations that communicate complex scientific concepts to people, whether it be a diagram that visualises research findings for a scientific journal, or a fun illustration that explains migration to children . 

Miniature anatomical model of the heart, cast in resin, created as part of an honours project

The focus for her honours project is exploring the ways in which illustration might be used to aid the communication of complex medical information within a hospital environment. In particular, the focus will be on comparing the way in which traditional (2D) and digital (primarily 3D) medical illustrations may affect user understanding and experience when used as educational tools. 

When she isn’t doing scientific or medical illustrations she is creating illustrations for children’s books. Emma has been spending most of her spare time working on illustrating a cool science based project that is aimed at raising awareness about NZ insects alongside an entomologist at UoA. She can’t say too much about this project yet as it hasn't been released, but it has been about a years worth of work and she’s pretty excited to see it come out later this year.

Emma is really into science and conversation and over the past few years has been doing a bit of wildlife rehabilitation volunteer work (at NZ Bird Rescue). After her honours is completed she is looking forward to getting back into it.

What inspires our talented Emma? Well she originally started combining her interest in art with her other interest- science, while studying Ecology and Conservation. Which is where her inspiration stems from. Visual design has a lot to offer in terms of making scientific information more accessible and enhancing scientific communication, in both natural sciences and medicine.

Emma’s fav illustration from this year (so far) is the ear anatomy illustration. She has been working on as part of a series of illustrations for the ENT department at Starship. Its not particularly special in terms of medical illustration but it was significant for Emma in terms of learning quite a bit about the technical limitations of the medium she was using (watercolour) and how it could be applied for medical subjects. 

After her honours project is over Emma hopes to do an internship with scientific/medical illustrators to gain some more experience, and is hoping to do some travel too. Emma is looking forward to applying what she’s learnt this year to carrying on with freelance scientific and medical illustration work. An eventually would like to translate this visual science communication into books for children. 

Keep up the awesome work Emma! We look forward to seeing your completed honours project!

To check out more of Emma’s great work click here.

CO-DESIGNING WITH ADOLESCENTS WITH PSYCHOSIS: Workshop 2

Card sort activity to organise content and information

Yesterday, Nick and Ivana ran a second co-design workshop with young adults with psychosis. Unlike the first workshop, this workshop was based in the community at the Taylor Centre in Ponsonby. We had a range of participants who each shared their own experiences of living with psychosis, and helped us understand their day-to-day challenges. Through a series of interactive activities, we explored how an app or website could support their needs and help them live well with psychosis. 

The findings we collected will help to inform the direction and design of early concepts and the types of content users value.