Design-Thinking in Action: Meet BIF-3 Storyteller Matt Cottam

At it's core, a design-thinking approach to innovation focuses nearly all its energy on the end user. The process has been written about extensively - I've blogged about it before and BIF member Continuum even presented a full-day seminar on it last year. I find though that I learn better through example rather than theory. Meet BIF-3 storyteller Matt Cottam - CEO of Providence’s Tellart design studio and an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design...

Marlon Brando. Robert DeNiro. Matt Cottam?

It’s probably not often that Matt Cottam is mentioned in the same breath with actors whose painstaking research and total immersion in character produced some of the most memorable performances in American film history. But a few years ago, on a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) project to develop robots used in training army medics, Cottam borrowed a page from the Method Actors’ handbook.

As he and his RISD students were designing lungs for the robots, Cottam realized that the only way to truly understand what features would be most effective for training medics was to become a medic himself. So Cottam enrolled in an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) course, eventually becoming an EMT-Cardiac and an Advanced Life Support (ALS) Medic for the National Ski Patrol.

Cottam says the mannequins he and his class developed (with fellow RISD Alum Ryan Bardsley from the Sim Group at MGH) are extremely lifelike, have exceedingly realistic simulated injuries and reactions to treatments, and are rugged to boot—“as durable as a bicycle,” he says. In addition, Ski Patrol training showed Cottam the need for a better rescue toboggan, so he and his students designed one. It is outfitted with lightweight and compacted versions of the equipment found on high-tech ambulances, allowing the Ski Patrol to give real emergency care on the slopes.

Cottam isn’t the first designer to put himself in the end-user’s place; the practice is known as participatory design. But he admits that going so far as to become an ALS Ski Patrol medic “is a pretty extreme case, and a pretty extreme hobby.”

As it turns out, it was only the beginning. The next project for Cottam’s class was the development of a protective suit which Paramedics and other emergency medical workers could wear to a HAZMAT scene. To most effectively address the design issues of the suit, Cottam felt he should approach the problem from a firefighter’s or Disaster Medic’s perspective. Like Brando living in a wheelchair before playing a handicapped man, or DeNiro packing on 60 pounds to play a retired boxer, Cottam decided the project required him to extend his emergency medical-care training—for three years.

“I never would have thought to design a HAZMAT suit for a paramedic, except that through my training I realized there were these incredible bottlenecks in the emergency-care process,” he says. “Having treated real patients myself, I believe I became a more effective designer of the suits,” he says.

Existing HAZMAT suits are so oppressive that firemen can only stand to wear them for about half an hour, meaning that in most cases, firemen can only drag victims behind a decontamination line rather than treating them at the scene. Cottam realized that a medic who could treat and intubate patients directly at a HAZMAT scene could save many more people.

Cottam’s industrial design education also showed him where the HAZMAT suits needed improvement. The suit he and his students designed was presented at a FEMA conference last year. It was so popular that it was featured in Metropolis magazine and exhibited at the International Design Biennale in France.

But Cottam isn’t resting on his laurels. Even with a few more months to go as a paramedic intern, he’s already serving as a medic for a federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team. Life as a medic may seem like a departure for Cottam, but his first-hand experience has helped him more fully answer the central question he ponders in every design project: “How do we make technology truly useful and meaningful—how can technology have a symbiotic relationship with complex ecosystems (made up of humans, buildings, transport, nature and business) found not only in cities, but in more remote and extreme environments?”

Those answers have a profound effect on Cottam's designs. His process though should not be viewed as exclusive to the designer's domain. As Patti Seybold writes:

"I’ve found a number [of innovative companies] that have done a great job of ethnography--really walking in their customers’ shoes. When it’s done well, this ethnography isn’t something that’s done by a market research organization. It’s something that product developers and designers and product managers and marketing executives and e-business executives get personally engaged in. You don’t do it once. You do it continuously. "

Don't miss Matt Cottam's story at our upcoming summit on October 10th and 11th. Learn more.