Dr Leah Heiss

RMIT Senior Lecturer - Design Futures

Designing with people front and centre is transforming lives.

The collaborative work of designers, researchers, governments and industry is improving medical devices and making treatment delivery easier and more attractive. My practice traverses device, service and experience and my process is deeply collaborative, working with experts from nanotechnology, engineering and health services through to manufacturing. Projects I’ve worked on include jewellery to administer insulin through the skin, emergency jewellery for times of medical crisis, swallowable devices to detect disease, and a wearable pin to detect loneliness, designed with Bolton Clarke aged care providers. 

People centred solutions

The idea of ‘people centred’ solutions is not new. My Austrian grandfather Heinz Heiss was an orthopaedic shoeman and once designed shoes for a woman who’d never been able to dance due to her disability. Looking like ordinary Mary Janes, they concealed complex orthopaedic inserts and enabled her to temporarily forget her disability and dance. Fast forward 30 years and I was embedded with Nanotechnology Victoria and fell in love with NanoMap technology. It’s a little patch about 10 mm across and 2 mm thick with 1-10,000 microneedles. The patch enabled pain free delivery of insulin through the skin into the blood stream, replacing syringes. But the device to administer it was big, bright blue and in a large metal suitcase. This started a wonderful dialogue about designing contemporary jewellery that delivered drugs. We came up with a diabetes neck piece that applied the patch to the skin.In all the work we do, aesthetics, tactility and usability must be balanced with manufacturability and cost. By bringing users into the design process early on, we are considering the human experience in parallel with the technology’s operation.

Wearable health technologies

In 2016 I was invited to design the form and user experience for Facett, the world’s first self-fit and modular hearing aid for Blamey Saunders hears. Inspired by Museums Victoria’s mineralogy collection, I wanted it to look different. The intent is to intrigue users and to overcome our instinctual fear response when confronted by something alien or frightening. These wearable health technologies are integrated into our sense of self-identity rather than separate to it. We have also worked with industry and health care providers to develop better models for navigating health care systems and voluntary assisted dying.

At RMIT, we’re using our design expertise to tackle big issues and deliver human centred solutions. And we’re doing that by keeping people front and centre. For the creators, it’s about designing a hearing aid that people are proud to wear or a necklace that looks cool but also keeps you alive, or maybe even a very ordinary looking pair of Mary Janes that enable a woman to dance for the first time.