This interview is awesome.

There were three reasons why I found it fascinating:

1) One is the fact of applying design tools such as ethnographic research in a medical environment, where one might not normally expect to find designers at work.

2) The second is the widely diverse nature of the problems they study and the solutions that they recommend. “Our solutions focus on the areas of people, process, content, space, and technology.” Sounds like it goes beyond look-and-feel to me. (Not that look-and-feel isn’t important, at all.) The type of design they’re doing is fascinating to me for the breadth of its scope. I mean, it sounds like their job is to look at practically any aspect of the Mayo Clinic and figure out ways to make it better. Damn, that’s awesome.

3) The third is their overtly stated interest in “designing for emotion”.

Emotion is such an important element to talk about in relation to designing compelling service experiences. In a healthcare environment, emotion is often at its peak levels, mostly because of the nature of the situation that patients are in when they seek healthcare services.

It seems like this is a huge difference from most hospitals and healthcare facilities I’ve seen, where the environment and processes seem designed to suppress or ignore emotion as much as possible. I’m not even quite sure what he means by “designing for emotion”, but it sounds like a good idea to me.