A Possible Future for

Medical Data Collection Devices

How do speculative & all-digital designs change the user’s access to the technical artifact as a vehicle for human knowledge & connection?

Since the advent of the computer in and around the 1950’s, and accelerated by the invention of Ethernet and the World Wide Web in the 1970’s and 1980’s, a whole new realm of technical artifacts have become accessible to the designer: hybrid and fully digital artifacts. In ye olde 2024, digital designs are so ubiquitous and commonplace that one has to read the description of a ‘Designer’ job posting to know if the work will be entirely digital; the digital realm dominates even disciplines that create physical objects, like Industrial Design. Having built my whole technical artifact theory based on the creation of physical objects, I knew it would be important to include a project that contained even a fraction of the digital aspects of modern product design.

Since we have now reached the exploration of the forefront of the evolution of the technical artifact, we must also acknowledge that even functional digital artifacts are but speculative prototypes; executions approximating experiences we would like to design using current technology. We touched on the topic briefly in A Possible Future for Sustainable Living, but Speculative Design is a large driver in the evolution of technology, specifically for deciding the direction of its development.

The overlap between the two design subdisciplines is so large that, since the advent of the Futurist Art movement, we have been using fiction (fantasy, science fiction, and design fiction) to imagine possible futures of humanity, proximate or distant. Examples that come to mind include Alan Kay’s Dynabook (imagining the portable computer prior to its invention); several science fiction depictions of video calling; or Dick Tracey’s or the Jetsons’ visualizations that are eerily similar to today’s smartwatches. They imagined so we could create.

For me, the ultimate frontier for speculative digital design is the medical device industry; the reasons are twofold.

Firstly, the incidence of health problems is only rising, even if our knowledge about the body and its health is at a historic high. Part of the problem is the access to that knowledge, though that topic itself could span its own 200+ page book. The other part, the one on which I focus this project, is the one of a more technological nature: personal data provisions and access to and control of one’s health.

There’s an enormous difference between knowing the type and magnitude of a particular metric that cause serious detriments to one’s health (say, blood sugar levels), and knowing in real time your personal blood sugar level and being able to have a say in its levels and preventing an illness, such as diabetes.

Secondly, health-related scientific R&D is very well funded,
rigorously tested, and the application of this research is often
highly sought after in our society. In particular, medical technology
R&D gets an opportunity often not present in most commercial
industries, in that it favors speculative-style research in design
of technologies and devices for medical applications.

A Possible Future for Medical Data Collection Devices is intended as a 3-for-1 examination of both speculative design and digital design as methods and/or mediums for the creation of medical and health-related technical artifacts. Specifically, to continue the train of thought from previous projects and examine the impact these methods of artifact creation have on the user’s access to the information contained within them. APF: MedDevs is also an extension of APF: Sust, just within the context of medical devices. I hope to speculate upon and explore the possibilities in form & function of wearable medical devices for the [ I imagined in previous projects.

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