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Associate Professor Edgar Rodriguez Ramirez
Victoria University of Wellington, School of Design, Wellington, NZ
Dr Edgar Rodriguez Ramirez is an industrial designer who investigates how to design medical devices for human experience. He has designed commercial products in France, Italy, Mexico, South Korea and New Zealand. He co-leads the Smart Interactions group at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design, where he is also the Programme Director for Industrial Design. His research focuses on investigating what are the needs of people around medical procedures and designing for satisfying those needs. The Smart Interactions group designs physical devices with digital interfaces. A strong area of focus in the group is to apply exergames to rehabilitative devices to improve engagement to therapies.


How Interaction Design and Prototyping Contribute to the Medtech CoRE

The decision making process for the design of digital and physical products should rely heavily on understanding the experience people go through when interacting with those designed objects, systems and services. In the design industry, this is often done in an iterative process through observation of people performing everyday activities, creating prototypes, testing them with users, and repeating this process over and over.

However, understanding the human experience for medical technologies presents different challenges than for the design of consumer products. For instance, ethical requirements limit access to participants, including the number of participants, the time available to work with participants and the kind of interactions that can be tested. Furthermore, design decisions can not be based on a designer’s whim, and need to have more robust methodologies.

This talk will present examples of how the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) tackles the challenge of designing for the human experience in medical technology projects. The projects include the initial stages of designing a device for pelvic floor disorders, design experiments on devices for adolescents with type 1 diabetes and the design of devices for stroke rehabilitation. The projects are initial collaborations between VUW and other CoRE MedTech partners, including the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, Auckland University of Technology and Callaghan Innovation.