Design as a Driver for Innovation in the Healthcare Sector

The Healthcare field is a sector that has significantly evolved more than anything else, especially from the points of view of technological and clinical innovation. The Design discipline has also been measured with a radical change that has reconfigured the founding paradigms, opening itself up to other fields of knowledge and activating virtuous cooperation that led to innovative research and practices. In the last few years, there has been increasing interest in the potential of design methodologies and approaches to improve Healthcare thanks to the ability of the Design discipline to draw on a tradition of creative and divergent thinking able to face fundamental sociocultural challenges. The convergence of these two disciplines is configuring new scenarios of innovation where Design is a key element for the creation of products and services with a strong impact on our societies’ health, changing habits, structures, and the way users and designers look at medical products. This article presents a transversal framework for a possible taxonomy of innovative healthcare products and services in which both the users and the technologies play a decisive role in the process of ideation, production, and consumption.