On the Human Health, Impact and Technology webinar series on March 11th 2025, Dr. Lorna Ross, Head of Department, Design & Creative Media at ATU Donegal spoke to host Professor Patricia Maguire about "Patient centric healthcare transformation". In case you missed it, here are the top takeaways.
A masterclass of interdisciplinary
Lorna began her career in traditional design, studying fashion textiles before pursuing graduate work at the Royal College of Art in London. This journey led her to intersect with emerging tech, where she brought her design background into the field of tech research. Over time, Lorna worked across diverse sectors, including the military, education, and healthcare, always keeping the human experience at the forefront. Throughout her career, Lorna focused on human-centred innovation, ensuring that systems, though optimized for efficiency, didn't lose sight of the human experience. Her work emphasizes the vulnerability and fragility of individuals within these systems, striving to balance technological progress with the enduring human spirit at the core of every design.
Design as a Time Machine
At the Mayo Clinic, Lorna worked to make complex systems more transparent, as many were opaque and difficult for people to understand or interrogate. Designers often focus on making the invisible visible, and Lorna’s team created vivid representation maps to help people pause and examine the decisions being made around them. A key part of their work was guiding the clinic through its digital transformation, using design as a tool to simulate and anticipate possible futures. Design, she believes, acts like a time machine—allowing you to explore different future scenarios, assess their impact, and weigh trade-offs. This process helps decision-makers step away from historical biases or personal agendas, encouraging more informed and thoughtful choices for the future.
Rethinking Design Education in the Northwest of Ireland
With over 30 years of experience as a designer, Lorna has often reflected on the state of design education and the evolving skills needed in the workplace. Having built large design teams and hired designers, she has witnessed firsthand how the field is in a period of disassembly, requiring a rebuild. As design faces natural disruptions, Lorna believes it’s an important moment to rethink its societal contributions—especially in areas like environmental sustainability, government policy, and social impact. Her current role at Atlantic Technological University (ATU), offers a unique opportunity to shape this reimagining. ATU, which consolidates eight campuses and is only two years old, is still in the process of merging smaller colleges, making it an exciting time to ask big questions about the future of design. Situated close to Northern Ireland, with Derry just half an hour away, the university's cross-border collaboration and its focus on design's role in both local and global contexts are important to the region's development.
Designing Combat Gear for the Navy SEALs
Lorna’s experience designing combat gear for Navy SEALs began when she was working in wearable tech in a Palo Alto lab after her graduate studies. While presenting at a conference, she was inspired by a talk on DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defence's research agency, and was determined to connect with a key figure there. After initially being ignored, she finally caught their attention when she presented later that day, leading to an offer to work with them. For two years, she provided design oversight for DARPA’s ambitious "future soldier" program, where there was little design input in the development of advanced military gear. To better understand the user community, Lorna spent six months living with Navy SEALs and Special Operations teams, immersing herself in their world to act as a proxy for their needs. This was a challenging but fascinating experience, requiring her to unlearn her traditional design principles to meet the unique and extreme preferences of the military, a process that pushed her to rethink what it meant to design for such an extraordinary user group.
Human-Centred Design in the Mayo Clinic
At the Mayo Clinic, Lorna and her team had the privilege of being deeply embedded in clinical practice, working closely on projects that focused on improving the patient experience. With extraordinary access to both inpatient and outpatient settings, they spent their time understanding not only the tools and systems in place but also the culture of decision-making, hierarchy, and the often invisible orthodoxies that govern healthcare. The team’s approach was to walk in the patients' shoes, exploring how they navigated the system and identifying areas where they were confused or making ill-informed decisions. This work involved spending months working with patient families, understanding their backstories and the context of their medical journey, as well as their hopes for recovery. Mayo Clinic, as a destination medical centre, attracted patients from around the world, and the designers worked to ensure that the systems and environments were truly human-centric. The work was emotionally intense, requiring deep empathy and understanding of complex, often harrowing personal stories.
A Solution-Driven Approach to Healthcare Delivery
Rethinking patient care delivery involved a comprehensive and analytical approach. Lorna and her team would begin by creating diagnostic maps to better understand the system’s connections and pinpoint underlying issues. By using the patient’s voice as a central element, they could explore how patients felt about their care, which informed their design process. Rather than just identifying problems, they focused on developing actionable solutions, unlike the common trend of simply highlighting problems without offering tangible answers. Their work involved running experiments and proposing solutions with measurable outcomes, ensuring that the investments made by healthcare practices would lead to improved patient results. This rigorous, almost scientific methodology allowed them to demonstrate the practical impact of their innovations on patient care, shifting from a problem-focused narrative to one of real, meaningful progress.
Finding the Balance Between AI Technology and Personalized Care
Lorna believes that AI is currently overhyped, likening it to a hammer in search of a nail. She compares the excitement around AI to how we once viewed smartphones and the web—technologies that were assumed to be inherently positive and progressive. There’s a common belief that if something is talked about enough, it must have value, but Lorna stresses the need to distinguish between the noise surrounding AI and its actual impact. For example, in Ireland, there’s significant debate over the environmental effects of server farms needed to power AI, yet there’s little transparency about the payback or tangible benefits of these investments. She argues that tech often operates with an unclear return on investment, and without concrete evidence of its impact, we should approach AI with much more caution.
During her time at Mayo Clinic, Lorna and her team were heavily involved in the transition to digital healthcare. She observed that while healthcare is inherently human, efforts to standardize, automate, or outsource aspects of it, particularly in complex fields like mental health, often fall short. For example, asking patients to manage their mental health through an app can oversimplify the deeply personal and nuanced nature of their care. Lorna stressed that people often seek a one-size-fits-all solution to individualized health problems, but medicine is inherently personalized. While technology, especially AI, certainly has a role in healthcare, she believes it's being marketed to the wrong areas of medicine, especially when the narrative suggests it could replace human intelligence. Instead, tech should be seen as a tool to assist healthcare, not replace it, and only if it can be standardized safely. There's a key difference between using tech as a helpful tool and as a replacement for human judgment.
Aligning health and planetary wellbeing
Lorna envisions a future where the healthcare and environmental conversations merge into one, recognizing that both are deeply interconnected. She believes that what makes humans thrive—our vulnerability, resilience, and strength—is intrinsically linked to the health of nature itself. Humans and the environment are shaped by the same patterns, generations, and natural forces. Lorna argues that if we understood what allows both people and nature to thrive, we would see that the solutions are essentially the same. Yet, these conversations are often siloed, with different experts discussing them separately. She suggests that if we could align these discussions and find balance between our health and the planet's health, our approach to wellness would become much clearer. Ultimately, Lorna feels that we already know what keeps us healthy—it’s the same thing that keeps the planet healthy—but we’ve lost sight of that connection.