Improving medicine to better the world

As designers we inherently face the issue of designing to better the world on a daily basis. No matter what section of the field were in, from kitchen utensils, to eco design. We design products to improve others products of the past and to further improve the lives of those using our goods. Much of the time in industrial design we are encouraged to add a cool factor to entice people to buy our products, despite that their functionality also having been improved. There are very few segments of our field, which design products on a purely functional platform that are created wholly to solve the problems of the users without an outwardly “pretty” form. The fields, which this most often pertains to, are humanitarian, and medical design.

While researching products from the “a better world by design” conference, I came across a company, which sits in a category of functional design, which is extremely underappreciated. Ximedica, an offshoot of ITEM group, specializes in medical design, a field which is becoming increasingly important, partly due to the baby boomer generation reaching an age of medical need. Ximedica uses engineering and design to improve the ergonomic, function and experience users have with their products. Throughout a large portion of my life I have been extremely interested in medical design, and it is one of the reasons I am currently in the design field. Companies like Ximedica are the unsung heroes of the medical field, they are the people who create the devices that doctor and patients rely on, to give and receive proper treatment. While many consider medical products to be ugly objects, and the medical design field to be unasthetically pleasing, every object used within the medical field has been meticulously designed to ease the process those suffering and those healing. I have personally seen the emotional power of products used in the medical field, through the comfort, or discomfort patients experience while receiving treatment.

Ximedica is a company heavily devoted to the field of medical design and using its affects to improve the treatment of millions through ergonomics and engineering. The field of medical design is a way to create “a better world by design” in its purest form.