Meaghan Kennedy, MPH began her career in Public Health at the CDC working at the height of the HIV epidemic. Her experiences during this time exposed her to the nature of public health emergency response. She quickly realized how public health entities operated in a reactionary state, working to respond to the pandemic with methodologies that weren’t appropriate.
She became frustrated with a process that wasn’t working and that's how she came upon industrial design. Meaghan found herself in a completely new environment, teaching a research course at Georgia Tech, and working towards her Master’s in Industrial Design where she learned about design principles and methodologies. It was here that she developed her unique understanding of design simply as the process of manipulating products and processes in order to influence the way people interact with them.
“Design is about setting up the scenario to get the result you’re looking for. So you can call that manipulation, you can call that being deliberate. I think design is about how people interact with things”
Her entrepreneurial spirit led her to design, but uncertainty and discomfort led her to establish OSB. Leaning into that uncertainty is what continues to drive OSB today. “We’re an innovation accelerator. Accelerator means to just move things forward” OSB is the product of fulfilling an unmet need that combines design-thinking, consulting, innovation, and public health to create social impact.
REFLECTION: Why should Public Health include Design approaches?
In many ways, public health and design are the same. Our iterative people-centered processes are similar and at the end of the day, the intentions and desired outcomes are the same. Meaghan described design as manipulating the environment or conditions in which people live to create change. Using a dinner knife as an example she explained how design works to direct behavior, “certain cues we deliberately put on the product to tell people where to pick it up. so we are manipulating how they engage with the product, for their own good.”
In public health, we work to design healthy environments so that the conditions in which people live allow them to make healthier choices and lead healthier lives. The deliberate cues put in place are also a tactic used in public health which we simply call “cues to action”. This can be text messages from our doctors to get an annual check-up, or flyers we see everywhere telling us to get our flu shots.
Despite these similarities, Public Health and Design work in silos. Where Public Health can scientifically show impact over time, Design is creating change in the moment to meet the immediate needs of communities and people. This is where public health can learn from a design approach. Design has the ability to be flexible, fast-paced, and truly human-centered, in a way that public health can not due to being bound by protocols and scientific procedures.
Public health is often concerned with the large scale and high impact or trying to ensure that we have done our due diligence via research to convince other people that there is a need. While design does also look at wicked problems, it is done through small scale actions with heavy concern to put power in the hands of communities because that is where real and sustainable change is going to come from. Neither sector gets it fully right or executes these processes perfectly. No matter what we call these initiatives and frameworks – grassroots efforts, placekeeping, design-thinking, or implementation science – at the end of the day it’s about positively shaping outcomes for our communities and world.
Want to learn more about tangible examples of this kind of work? Here are some fantastic examples of ‘social impact design’ that directly relate to public health concerns: The Power of Designing for Social Impact
Writing by Emily Zheng, Public Health Innovation Analyst at Orange Sparkle Ball
Emily is a Master of Public Health student at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health. She is part of the Behavioral, Social, Health Education Sciences department and is also pursuing a certificate in Social Determinants of Health.
