Pharmacy of the Future: from Medication to Patient

We are living an era of great social changes: progress in medicine led to increased life expectancy and ageing population, and the advent of digital fabrication technologies revolutionized the way we use and produce objects, expanding nowadays its range in the field of medications, 3D-printing drugs and cosmetics. This opens new perspectives for the future pharmacy, which in the last years has been witnessing a growing tendency toward self-diagnosis and self-care that reduced pharmacists to mere sellers. Moreover, there is a strong demand for better adherence to treatments and monitoring of chronic diseases, as well as for customization of therapies and devices. The future pharmacy will be grounded on hyper- personalization, getting closer to the laboratory dimension taking back the production stage. Hyper- personalization won’t affect just aspects related to physiological user’s need – with multiple-dosage and controlled-release drugs – satisfying also aesthetic requirements able to turn medical devices into fashion accessories. This scenario has been implemented into the “Craft Pharmacy” concept, within the project ‘Inspiring the Future Pharmacy’ (Scanu 2019). The research – based on Design Thinking and Metadesign methodologies – started from a preliminary activity involving focus groups and surveys, culminating in a workshop with PhD and MS design students. ‘Craft Pharmacy’ places itself between innovation and tradition grafting new technologies on traditional galenic, twisting the figure of ancient apothecary with a new pharmacist-maker, and reevaluating his role since personalization requires expertise. It is organized around three main services – display, consultation, production – with the open laboratory as core of the retail space. Future is a multiplicity of ideas embedded in today’s practices (Kjaersgaard et al. 2016); through design then, acting as interpreter of a dynamic and complex reality (Antonelli 2008), is possible to bring qualitative improvement in the traditional pharmacy system, shifting the overall attention from medication to patient.