+ fuel for a healthy Barcelona

fuelfor in collaboration with business consultancy Oliver Wyman and the Design Management Program of the Istituto Europeo di Design Barcelona IED, is conducting an urban-scale experience design project called ‘Healthy Barcelona’. Working in partnership with 22@Barcelona, a progressive and ambitious city council initiative that is transforming the Poble Nou district of the city into an innovation hub that offers new ways to live, work and play.

The project pilots a new process of urban innovation using experience design, and delivers a healthy city strategy for Barcelona that will be used to identify further spin off projects with local business stakeholders.

+ fuel for NHS Scotland

In 2008, NHS Scotland launched its national Patient Experience Program, Better Together (www.bettertogetherscotland.com), which aims to empower patients, carers and health care staff to work in partnership to provide patient centred and equitable care, as well as improving NHS service planning and delivery.

Believing that a design approach to health care innovation could provide valuable insight and additional skills for their national Improvement and Support Team (IST), NHS Scotland’s Health Delivery Directorate asked fuelfor to create a 1 day master class in Patient Experience for 40 senior leaders as part of their Service Innovation and Transformation Program. Building on current NHS patient experience research tools and LEAN process improvement techniques, the master class was designed to meet the following objectives:

+ Provide an introduction to Experience Design for Health Care

+ Demonstrate a design approach for understanding patient experience and its implications for service innovation

+ Provide a set of principles that can be used to apply a patient experience approach within current service innovation practice

The workshop equipped key IST staff to enhance their skills as facilitators, transferring new thinking and techniques into their organisation for sustainable change. The outcome marks the start of a new way of thinking about health care services using experience design, allowing stakeholder insights to be more effectively translated towards service innovation.

more details I PDF

+ fuel for elderly

A number of key demographic, economic, socio-cultural and technology forces are reshaping the elderly care landscape and shifting our perceptions and expectations around aging and independent living.

How can design help citizens, policy-makers, product manufacturers and care service providers respond to these challenges in innovative, socially sensitive and sustainable ways.
How can we rethink the experience of aging in today's society?

fuelfor, in collaboration with soft product designer Ollie Niemi and product designer Ferran Lajara, carried out a preliminary design research project to explore the needs of elderly people, their families and care givers and identify opportunities for innovation. In a fast track process of 3 weeks from research-to-concept-to-prototyping, a set of provocative idea seeds have been developed and will be used to communicate a range of innovation opportunities found to exist within elderly care - from clothing to services, policies to built environment solutions.

more details I PDF

+ fuel for charging up

Practices and motivations relating to energy use have become increasingly important in people's lives for many reasons, ranging from finances to the environment. At the same time, we use more and more devices that need to be powered and we often become quite personally attached to them. This complex mix of issues plays out in very different ways in the personal lives and attitudes of people around the world. This has implications for a variety of public and private sectors organisations and businesses seeking to innovate in this domain, for example government policy makers, mobile device manufacturers or energy service providers.

fuelfor, in partnership with REACH global design research network, is conducting an international study called Charging Up to explore people's habits and attitudes around the charging up of mobile devices.

fuelfor will focus on the increasingly grey population to consider the limitations and opportunities of age on the use of mobile devices and the charging up experience itself. Through a series of home visits, interviews and observations with elderly users in Budapest and Barcelona, insights have been generated and will be comparatively analysed together with data from REACH project partners conducting similar research in Denmark, Netherlands, England, India, China, Brazil and Japan.

A summary pdf report containing key findings and implications for innovation will be available soon to download from the fuelfor and REACH websites.

+ fuel for a healthy region

Healthy Region Cuneo was an innovation project initiated in the summer of 2008 for the Italian regional health system of ASL CN1. Conducted within the framework of Torino World Design Capital 2008 and its international summer school program organized by Ezio Manzini, the project created an opportunity for public, commercial and academic collaboration. It showcased the value of design as a strategic and transformative tool.

Working with Politecnico di Milano and Bruce Mau Design, fuelfor led a team of 30 international designers through a 6-day innovation workshop; using collaborative research to understand the health issues of local stakeholders and contexts, design thinking to identify innovation opportunities, and design skills to transform these opportunities into sustainable health care propositions that harnessed local resources.

The result was eight sustainable health care propositions, applying local resources to tackle local needs related to obesity, rehabilitation and access to care. Talks are underway with the health care client to define possible next steps for the project.

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