Market Constraints and Context
Steelcase Inc. is the largest contract furniture manufacturer in the world. After the 2002 market crash, like every other B2B company, it sought to focus on the healthcare, education and government verticals. Steelcase had been selling products and services successfully to customers in these verticals for years, but the salesforce saw more opportunity via things like customized brochures, application design suggestions and standardization of certain special-request products. As part of the the global R+D function, our design research team undertook the exploration of the healthcare market in order to better understand possible opportunities and challenges. This foundational work led to the creation of a new business within the corporation now known as Steelcase Health. Here are some key points from the design research process.
Toward Patient-Centered Care
A review of the literature pointed to a trend toward the concept of patient-centered care. Upon a first round of observational field research in the U.S., it was clear that patient-centric concepts were not systemically being deployed in the physical environment. As one expert told us, “Healthcare’s solution to everything is to throw more people at it.” A combination of primary and secondary research led to the synthesis of key points for healthcare stakeholders. We validated these findings through customer workshops using storytelling techniques that became one of the most-requested customer experiences at Steelcase.
Prototyping At Home and In The Field
Gaining access to hospitals and clinics is no easy task. We were extremely grateful to the healthcare systems that granted us access and continue to respect the privacy of patients and staff. Even internally within the company, observational data was closely protected and yet as a design research team we had to share this knowledge with all kinds of multi-disciplinary teams. We began to establish a practice we called “experience re-creation” which became a key aspect of our concept prototyping workshops at corporate research headquarters. In addition, our team performed participatory design versions of these prototyping workshop with nurses and administrators in the field at Mayo Clinic where a shell structure that had not yet been built out was available for this purpose — creating a life-sized, true-to-scale prototype.
Toward A Business Plan
Innovation within existing, legacy organizations is notoriously difficult. The cooperative ideation process yielded such compelling solution concepts and experience re-creation, that our user-centered design research led to the formation of a team for creating a business plan. In future, these design research methods would morph into design thinking methods for business model and strategy development as well as traditional product and service design.
