Looking Forward to Thinking Outside the Box 2009: Design Groups

I'm going to be one of the facilitators of "design groups" at the Health Care Systems Design Intensive in Baltimore, Feb 2-5, 2009. The idea of design groups comes from the School for Designing a Society: a small group setting in which participants are invited think big. As a starting point, each participants is asked to write a list of statements about which she or he would say: "While it is not the case, I desire it to be the case." In other words, the assignment is to write a list of statements that are currently false—which the writer wishes were true. Statements of desire.

For the purposes of the Intensive, the theme of the statements ought to be about health care in some way. However, there may be different ideas about what is included in the category of health care ... and those differences carry the potential of frutiful discussion.

From this starting point of individual lists of desire statements, the group can go in a number of directions. For this intensive, which will be brief, we intend to offer several design tools and concepts, that help clearer thinking. The state of health care systems (particularly in the US, whose system ill-advisedly influential in many nations) is not only woefully inadequate, but also ill-understood and confusingly described. Such distinctions as health care cost vs health care spending are so confused that people become discouraged about the task of demanding health care as a right.

I hope the outcome of the design groups will be at least a clearer understanding of what's going in health care—some ideas and enthusiasm for coming up with ways of changing the system for the better.