Design changes the world case: baby sleeping bag

Sometimes, a course can change students' lives. This is what happened in Rahul? Rahul? Panicked), Jane? Chen (Jane? Chen), Linus? Liang (Linus? Liang) and later Na Man? Murti (Naganand? Murti). This happened when they used the design thinking method to complete the transition from blank page to insight and then to action. They turned a routine classroom assignment into a real-life product: a baby sleeping bag (hug? Baby warmers) 47. This is an easy-to-use medical equipment, which is 99% cheaper than the traditional baby incubator and is expected to save the lives of millions of newborns in developing countries.

The name of this course is "extremely economical and applicable product Design" (design? For what? Extreme? Love), in the school of design, almost everyone just calls it "extreme"-this word describes the course rhythm and classroom experience quite accurately. This course is taught by Professor Jim from Stanford Business School. Patel teaches with a group of teachers. "Extreme" is a multi-disciplinary melting pot, where students from various departments of Stanford look for solutions to complex practical problems.

Their project is to research and design a low-cost infant incubator for developing countries. Team members know little about the complications of premature delivery, let alone design medical products for other countries. Their members include electrical engineers, computer experts and MBA students, all of whom are not public medical experts.

Their first step is to seek inspiration from the outside. They were ingenious and chose the meeting place in a tree outside the campus cafe (CoHo). Four students sit on it and search the global infant mortality problem on the Internet. The statistics they found are shocking: about 654.38+0.5 million premature babies and low birth weight babies are born every year, of which about 654.38+0 million people die, most of them die within 24 hours after birth. What is the most preventable cause of death? It's hypothermia. These babies are too young to have enough fat to maintain their body temperature, "said Jane, an MBA in the team. Chen said, "In fact, room temperature gives them the feeling of ice water. "About half of low birth weight babies are born in India, where hospital incubators can provide continuous life-sustaining heat during the critical days of the baby's birth, but the cost of each traditional incubator can reach $20,000.

A clear solution has emerged: the team can systematically reduce the cost of existing incubator design by eliminating some parts and using cheap materials. The research is over, right? However, the main principle of people-oriented design also requires you to "understand the feelings of end users". Skipping this basic step of innovation is not a real innovation choice. In order to obtain first-hand information and deeply understand the unmet needs of the incubator, Linus, a computer expert in the team? Liang was sponsored to go to Nepal. What I saw and heard there challenged his original design, inspired his creative inspiration and finally found an innovative solution.

Linus noticed something strange when he visited a modern city hospital in Nepal: many incubators donated to the hospital were idle. He asked inexplicably, since premature babies in this area need incubators to save lives, why are there so many idle ones? A doctor's explanation is simple and sad: many incubators in hospitals are not used because babies who need incubators are often born in villages 30 miles away. No matter how cheap and well-designed the incubator is, the struggle between life and death takes place in the mother's home, not in the hospital; Even if the newborn mother feels good and can travel far, her family helps her keep in touch with her baby all the time on the way to the hospital, she still doesn't want to be sent to treatment; And the family will go back to the village, which means that the premature baby will be taken home after just five or six days in the incubator, and it will probably stay in the incubator for several weeks.

Linus realized that the cost of incubator is only one of the design challenges brought by complex human needs.

Back in Palo Alto [50], the team discussed how to design according to the survey results. On the one hand, there is a clear need for some products that can help mothers and babies in rural areas; On the other hand, as an electrical engineer Rahul? Lie and say, "Dude, that's not easy." They should continue to solve technical challenges and design low-cost incubators for hospitals; Or should we solve people's needs and design solutions for mothers in remote areas? "We have different opinions on this," Rahul said. "Some people in the team tend to start with their mothers in remote areas ... Some people (including me) want to finish the design work before the end of the course." Finally, they consulted Sarah, one of the teaching assistants of the course. Stan. Greenberg (now the executive director of the School of Design) suggested: "When it comes to choice, you know I would say, choose a difficult challenge. This is the meaning of "pole" in the topic of "design of extremely economical and applicable products"

Therefore, instead of designing a new generation incubator for hospitals, the R&D team redefined the design challenge as:

For the "baby sleeping bag" design team, the starting point of the solution now is parents, not clinicians. They wrote this idea on the whiteboard of the team studio, which became the navigation light for the design team in the next 20 weeks, and continued to illuminate their future career path.

Then, the design team began to turn inspiration into innovative works. After four or five rounds of rapid prototyping, they developed a simple and efficient solution-shaped like a small sleeping bag with a paraffin-based parenting bag, which can be kept warm for up to 4 hours after being heated on a heater. Sleeping bags can be used outside the hospital, so that babies anywhere in the world can live in a warm and suitable temperature environment.

Their next step is to test the prototype among rural parents and stakeholders.

The design team brought the prototype pouch to India. They studied the subtle differences of local culture and learned the factors that might make mothers accept or reject the equipment. In the process, they discovered some factors that may never be found in Silicon Valley. For example, one day Rahul showed a prototype of a nursing bag to a group of mothers in a small town in Maharashtra [5 1]. At that time, the prototype pouch had a built-in thermometer, which was similar to a liquid crystal thermometer in a fish tank or a thermometer sticker for measuring a child's temperature [52]. Rahul got an unexpected and disturbing answer when he told mothers to heat the insulated baby bag to 37 degrees Celsius to help the baby keep warm. A rural mother explained that in her community, people think that western medicine is very effective, but they often overkill it. "So if the doctor prescribed a teaspoon of medicine for her child," she told Rahul, "to be on the safe side, I only gave him half a teaspoon. So if you let me heat it to 37 C, for safety reasons, I will only heat it to about 30 C. " An alarm sounded in Rahul's mind.

Traditional engineers may blame it on "user error" caused by improper use, but ignore it; But the "baby sleeping bag" project team immediately redesigned it. Now, when the "baby sleeping bag" reaches the correct temperature, the indicator only changes to "complete", so there is no value, so parents don't need to speculate. In this example, the prototype is adjusted according to the trial experience of real end users, and the improvement may be life and death.

At the end of the course, students face a difficult choice: what to do next? They may already have a working prototype. Rahul and Linus have started working in promising technology startups. After getting the MBA, Jane will choose among several job opportunities. One of the original team members, 5 1 (he recently became a father), decided not to devote himself to the project full-time. But the team didn't want this project to die, so they began to apply to social enterprise groups to raise funds to continue this project. Later, they set up a social enterprise company and went to India to market their solutions. "To some extent, we are unwilling to give up," Rahul told us. "Now that we know that we can really bring about change, do we just give up because we got a' better chance'? No, I don't agree. I want to dedicate the best years of my life to something meaningful. "

In two years, the design team traveled all over India, talking with mothers, midwives, nurses, doctors and shopkeepers. "The whole truth of baby sleeping bags is that we have to get close to the end users and make really high-quality designs for them," Jane said. "We have learned too much here, which is very important for the success of the product." They have countless logistical difficulties to overcome; We must constantly redesign according to the feedback from users. "We have no experience," Rahul said. "We don't know how to put medical equipment on the market. How can we carefully develop and test a product and maintain the standard while keeping the cost low? How do people in urban and rural areas view medical care? How can we deliver quality products and services there? "

20 10 12, on ABC news (ABC? News) made a special report on "Baby Sleeping Bag" in the 20/20 column. The program filmed a 5-pound baby girl named Nisha. She is the first child to use the "baby sleeping bag" in clinical trials, and may be the first life saved by this device. There is also a sad interview in the program. The interviewee Sudasha lost all her three newborns, each of whom was very low because she was too young to have enough fat to maintain her body temperature. After carefully examining the "baby sleeping bag", Su Dasha said, "If I have this … I can save my baby."

Since the TV program was broadcast, the team has made great progress: the company now has 90 employees; They constantly make design improvements, including the product itself, sales model and company structure; They have begun to sell their products to government departments and expand their channels to the poorest areas in India, but this official path has also brought new restrictions and requires new design improvements.

"We don't know how much time and money it will take to make the concept into a product and conduct clinical trials, let alone the cost of establishing a sales channel." 54 Jane recently published in Hawawi Business Review (Ha rvar d? The website wrote in the blog. Another challenge they didn't foresee was that although they knew that these parents had an urgent need for products, they still had to persuade their parents to change their traditional practices and use new "baby sleeping bags". In order to promote the products, they popularized the common sense of lowering body temperature to mothers and conducted clinical research to meet the standards of European medical devices.

We don't know how many mothers will avoid Sudasha's fate, but thanks to the creativity and perseverance of team members, they have helped more than 3,000 babies so far. After the success of the pilot project in India, they cooperated with NGOs in nine other countries, signed a global sales contract with General Medical Group, and recently released a "baby sleeping bag" heated by hot water instead of electricity.

This article is taken from the third chapter of Innovation and Confidence.