The Spark Blog Post: Design Thinking

In The Spark: Ideas in Innovation , we explore design thinking (an exploratory process that is open-ended, open-minded, and iterative) and how it can unleash creativity and innovation in health departments as a way of doing business, and a way to success in improving the health of the public.

Innovation Grantee Feature: Design Thinking Helps Ground Research Tools in End User Needs

Over the course of the Innovation Grant Program , we will occasionally feature brief progress updates from our grantees. In our first feature, we hear from the team at the University of Chicago about their design sprint weekend.

Academics long to see their research make broader impacts in the world. Health departments can use help making sense of their data resources with new statistical and technology applications. But as soon as academic jargon enters the public sphere, the need to translate between these two worlds becomes obvious. This is where designers come to the rescue. Designers are not just experts in fonts, logos, and branding. They can help design processes of service delivery, data collection or websites. They can also help to communicate complex systems and content in a clear and beautiful way that appeals to broader audiences. One of the key contributions of design thinking is to ground these processes in the needs of end users.

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science and School of Social Service Administration needed exactly this kind of help for a project funded by PHNCI that analyzes data to identify where government funding for health services is spent in relation to need — and where it could be spent. At a design sprint weekend , four experienced designers mentored 20 students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago . The sprint started with a project overview by the researchers, followed by two hours of interviews with end users from the Chicago Department of Public Health, two days of intensive project work, and final presentations with feedback from end users.

The goals of the sprint were to understand how the researchers’ analysis plan could be tailored to meet the health officials’ needs, how health officials think about the problem differently from researchers, how data collection and analysis works within the health department, and what critical concerns were. Students and mentors split into three teams to develop alternative user experiences and web interfaces for presenting the results and for outlining the flow of health department funding to nonprofit service providers. The intensive discussion with end users, combined with working through process and product questions in detail, resulted in a synchronization of research plans and end user needs that promises to be more successful than the original research plan. Click here to see photos of the design sprint.

21st Century States Update: Funding to Support FPHS

Over the summer, we shared information and resources from 21st Century grantees, three states (Ohio, Oregon, and Washington) that are modernizing their public health systems using the foundational public health services (FPHS) model. After several years of deliberate and strategic planning, assessing, and educating partners and policymakers, the 21st Century grantees have succeeded in receiving state funds to support their modernization goals moving forward.

 

Stay tuned to phnci.org for more detailed stories on how each state is using policy to support the modernization of their public health systems.