A Designer's Journey into Designing for Health and Healthcare with Lorna Ross — DT101 E45

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorna Ross, the Chief Innovation Officer at VHI Health and Well-Being, discusses her career and work at DARPA, Motorola, MIT Media Lab, the Rhode Island School of Design, Mayo Clinic, and Accenture. You’ll learn about how her stellar design career unfolded, ways to get into designing for health, and system design in healthcare. Show Host: Dawan Stanford.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Show Summary</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorna grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, where she studied textiles and fashion design, with the intention to have a career in the clothing industry. In the course of continuing her career in fashion, she approached her local bank for a loan and was told the bank didn’t give loans to designers. Realizing that she had few business skills, she returned to school, this time in London, where she entered an industrial design program with a focus on computers and technology. She had her first foray into wearable tech with a project where she designed a glove that was also a phone.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As she was finishing up her degree, Lorna was picked up by a research lab in Palo Alto led by Paul Allen, who eventually became a co-founder of Microsoft. This first job set the benchmark for the quality of the work environments she has looked for during her entire career.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At her first wearable tech conference in the early 1990s, Lorna was introduced to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) via a presentation by Dick Urban. Their work felt like science fiction to her and seemed radical and experimental, and she found it fascinating. At that same conference, Lorna gave a presentation and afterwards, was immediately offered a job at DARPA, which she accepted. Lorna worked with many of the big names in military manufacturing, where she reviewed programs, critiquing them from a user perspective.</span></p> <p><span