Curious About…Turning Lemons into Lemonade.
(From my Chinese Column, as usual, presented in its original Mandarin and English. Special thanks go to my colleague Elyssa He for what I am sure was a complicate translation.)
A couple of months ago I had a persistent cough and had to go into hospital for an MRI to have my lungs examined. I am 49 years old and pride myself on being emotionally resilient, but the second I entered the MRI tunnel, I became a total child, claustrophobia overcoming me and rendering me in a complete state of panic. I made such a fuss the doctor had to stop the process. After three attempts, the nurse gave up and I was sent, at massive personal expense, to an open MRI in another part of town.
Bob Schwartz is the General Manager of Global Design at GE Healthcare. Schwartz tells a story of a similar epiphany that has driven their design philosophy and revolutionized their business at the same time.
As I witnessed first hand, for adults, getting an MRI can be an incredibly intimidating experience. For children, it can be downright scary - with many having to be sedated before they receive diagnostic imaging. Schwartz and his team watched children and their parents go into intense panic, taking longer time for nurses and radiologists to administer treatment, not to mention the fact that many required potentially dangerous sedation to enter the closed MRI tunnel. They decided to reframe the challenge, to look at this constraint as an opportunity: to see if, metaphorically, they could turn lemons into lemonade.
To inspire themselves, the team looked at children’s museums, theme park and playgrounds, and talked to daycare and childhood development experts to understand the needs and perspectives of young patients.
“We did simple things that get overlooked,” says Schwartz. “I mean, some of the most effective insights we got came from kneeling down and looking at rooms from the height of a child.”
He pushed his team to think in terms of what kids see and how they relate to the world.
“Our first design session was actually in a daycare,” he said. “We knew we had to come at this from a different perspective.”
Kathleen Kapsin, director of the Pediatric Radiology Department at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, agrees: “All of our equipment is very high-tech,” she says. “We can get you great images, but we can’t get them if the child isn’t lying still and feeling well enough to go through the scan.”
The final solution is best described on GE’s website:
“Aaaarrrr ye ready?” the hospital technologist growls, handing the patient a black-felt pirate hat. “Yer pirate ship awaits, Cap’n.”
The child draws the hat to his head. Skull-and-crossbones sneer through the waiting room, as if proclaiming, “I’m not just a patient. I’m a pirate.” The 7-year-old’s mother holds his hand as they walk to the CT (Computed Tomography) room. She assures him that he’s going to have a great adventure. They’ve come to the Children’s Hospital—to have his sinus cavities scanned.
As the mini-swashbuckler nears the room, a set of brown planks extend into the hallway, leading to his ship. Soon there is crisp blue water beneath and the subtle smell of coconut in the air.
“Welcome to Pirate Island,” a nurse says, as the boy enters the room.
On this day, 7-year old Duncan Auer is a pirate. Duncan’s boat is actually a specially decorated CT machine. The exam bed has been made to look like a hull. The CT tube: a wooden steering wheel. The water and planks below: brown and blue decals on the floor. The coconut smell: an aromatherapy scent—piña colada—churning from a black vaporizer in the corner.
There are seven other rooms besides Pirate Island, whose themes include a jungle, a campground and an underwater fantasy. They are part of a pilot GE Healthcare program called the GE Adventure Series™, developed in partnership with Children’s Hospital, to help reduce stress in children undergoing imaging scans.
“Children are very cooperative,” says Duncan’s mother, Liz Auer, who works as a preschool teacher. “If you can use your imagination and encourage kids to use theirs, you can make any experience into something that can be fun or, at the very least, relaxing and not stressful,” she says.
The results speak for themselves: an article published in the Journal of Pediatric Nursing, in 2008, describes in detail the dramatic drop in the need for use of sedation after the room was decorated.”
Why am I telling you this? I’ve said several times in this column that design is the overlap between two things – a mindset and a skillset. The mindset is one of optimism, of believing in the possibility of change, of turning problems on their head and looking for solutions. Not seeing lemons, but the ingredients of lemonade.
The skillset is taking these ideas and making them tangible, to help connect to people in ways that matter – taking technology that scares people and making it into an adventure, of creating a powerful and delightful experience when before there was only a disjointed set of potential negative outcomes. In GE’s case, turning the act of looking inside your body into an act of looking inside your mind to something powerful, human and exciting.
To making lemonade.
关于化柠檬为柠檬汁的好奇心
几个月前，我一直咳嗽不断，不得不去医院做一个肺部的核磁共振检查。我49岁，自认情感控制力还不错，可没想到就在被推进扫瞄隧道的那一刻，我完全像个孩子似的害怕起来，一种幽闭恐怖的感觉瞬间笼罩我的全身，让我彻底惊慌失措。由于我的慌张，医生不得不暂停检查。试了三次后，护士决定放弃，把我送往城镇的另一个地方，接受费用不菲的、开放式的核磁共振检查。
通用电气医疗集团全球设计部的总经理Bob Schwartz曾讲过一个类似的故事，这个故事令他们顿然领悟，不仅驱动了设计理念，而且从根本上转变了他们的业务模式。
就如我亲身经历的一样，核磁共振会让成年人感到极为害怕，对于孩子来说更是无法承受的恐惧，况且很多孩子在影像诊断前还必须靠注射镇静剂。Schwartz和他的团队观察到，整个过程中孩子及其父母变得极度恐慌，这对护士和放射科医生造成了时间上的拖延，更何况很多人在被推进那个封闭隧道前还得接受注射有潜在危害的镇静药物。对此，团队决定重新审视挑战，化危机为转机，打个比喻来说就是，看看有没有可能把酸酸的柠檬做成香甜的柠檬汁。
为了寻求启发，团队特别到儿童博物馆、主题公园和游乐场开展观察，并采访了幼儿及儿童成长专家，了解小患者的需求和想法。
“我们做的事很简单，不过往往被忽视，”Schwartz说道，“我是说，一些最有效的洞察发现，恰恰是我们通过跪下来、从一个孩子的高度去看待治疗室的过程中得来的。”
他要求团队去思考孩子们眼中的世界，以及他们与世界的联系。
匹兹堡大学医学中心附属儿童医院的小儿放射科主任Kathleen Kapsin对此表示认同：“我们所有的设备和技术都非常高端，”她说道，“图像的质量不是问题，关键是如果孩子不能安静地躺在那里轻松地接受扫描，那么就根本没法获得图像。”
最终解决方案在通用电气官网上可以找到最形象的描述：
“你……准备好了吗？”医院技术人员边用低沉的声音说道，边递给患者一顶黑色的海盗毡帽。“海盗船一切就绪，船长。”
孩子将帽子扣在头上，只见帽上的“骷髅图案”仿佛在移动中轻蔑地扫了一眼候诊室，扬言道：“我可不仅仅是患者。我还是一名海盗。”在走向CT（电脑断层）扫描室的路上，这位7岁孩子的母亲一直握着儿子的手，安慰着告诉他，等待他的将是一段奇妙的探险旅程。他们是来儿童医院接受鼻窦扫描检查的。
就在这位“小海盗”走近检查室的同时，走道中延伸出了一排棕色的“登船木板”。很快，下方出现了湛蓝的“海水”，空气中弥漫着淡淡的“椰子香味”。
“欢迎来到海盗岛。”在男孩进入房间的时候，传来一名护士的声音。
这天，7岁的Duncan Auer是名“海盗”。Duncan的“船”实际上是一部经过特别装饰的电脑断层扫描机。检查床看起来就像是“船”的外壳，而CT隧道就是一个“木质的方向盘”。下面还有“水”和“木板”，其实是贴在地上的棕色和蓝色的贴花纸。“椰子香味”则是房间一角的黑色蒸馏器里发出的凤椰汁的熏香。
“海盗岛”旁边还有其他7个检查室，主题包括热带丛林、露营地和海底幻想。这些都隶属于通用电气“GE Adventure Series™”这个医疗试点项目，这个项目是与儿童医院共同开发，旨在帮助减缓儿童接受成像扫描时的压力。
“孩子们都很配合，”Duncan的母亲Liz Auer这样说道，她同时也是一名幼儿教师。“如果你能运用你的想象力，并鼓励孩子们发挥他们的想象力，那么任何体验都可以变得非常有趣，至少不会有压力，比较放松。”她说道。
我为什么要写这些呢？正如我之前在专栏中多次提到的，设计是双重因素影响的结果：即心态和技能。心态就是一种乐观的表现，要相信可以带来转变，问题总会有转机和解决方案。也就是说，不是眼睁睁地看着酸溜溜的柠檬，而是要看到柠檬汁里的香甜成分。
而技能是指具体呈现这些创意和方案，用必要的方式与人们建立起联系：利用让人们感到害怕的技术，将其转化成为一场冒险经历，创建一种强大的、令人愉悦的体验，而不是像过去那样带来各种零散的潜在负面影响。在通用电气的这个例子中，就是将扫描人体内部的这种行为，转变为深入人们的内心世界，并辅以一种强大的、人性化的、振奋人心的体验作为支撑。
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