Recorded February 11, 2022, as part of the UX Speaker Series in the University of Washington's Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.

Design for people: who gets stuck with the complexity?

Human-centered design means rejecting good excuses for failure.  We will present lessons learned about keeping the focus on patient outcomes in the design of medical devices for low-resource settings.  We will contrast our work on newborn health, most recently with Doctors without Borders on a newborn warmer for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, with the design of a reusable face shield PPE for American hospitals during the first weeks of the COVID pandemic.

Timothy Prestero is the CEO of Design that Matters (DtM), a 501c3 nonprofit based in Redmond, Washington.  DtM collaborates with international aid agencies and hundreds of superstar volunteers to design breakthrough medical devices for low-resource hospitals in developing countries.  As of Jan 2021, DtM’s Firefly phototherapy device has reached 33 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe--with new installations in Senegal, Niger and Malawi.  Firefly devices have treated 433,000 newborns.  Products that DtM has helped design and launch have treated a total of 1.1M patients worldwide.  In 2012, DtM was named the winner of the National Design Award.  Tim holds graduate mechanical engineering degrees from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.