Researcher Profile: Jaye Buchbinder

Our newest member of the lab is Jaye Buchbinder, coming from California to work on research towards the opportunities and stakeholder understanding of the DHW lab. She’s currently a Master's student at Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, looking at the intersection between management effectiveness and efficiency as well as entrepreneurship and scaling innovation. During her undergrad (also at Stanford), Jaye studied Sustainable Design and Engineering, where she spent a lot of time in the engineering department and design school studying sustainability not only in the environmental sense but also in longevity of design and impact on people.

Her experience with design is a wide range between sustainable engineering at Emeco, an American furniture manufacturer, to materials engineering at BMW, product launch design at Victoria’s Secret, teaching design thinking across Asia, and innovation scaling at the Stanford Hospital for her most recent research project.

She is incredibly excited to be in the land of the Kiwi’s, already addicted to the coffee here, absolutely loves picking up new slang, and always looking to make her trip chockablock of adventures!

Researcher Profile: Antonio Wan

Over the coming weeks, we will be running a few short profiles on recent research projects run at the DHW lab. Antonio Wan has worked on a baby bath design with the Neonatal ICU staff:

Currently the design is a working prototype Antonio is looking to develop through further Postgraduate Research at the lab.

Researcher Profile: Emma McInnes

Emma recently completed her honours degree as part of the Sustainable Transport Project at the Auckland DHB. 

Auckland’s roads are reaching capacity, making traffic congestion the cities biggest issue. 

Transport problems around the Auckland City Hospital (ACH) are a consequence of Auckland’s auto-dependent car culture.  Parking at ACH is a major source of complaint from visitors and staff and this is because there is parking capacity for 4000 cars, yet Auckland’s District Health Board employs nearly 10,000 staff members. 

The project is therefore about increasing ACH staff’s alternative transport patronage to provide solutions to the parking and transport problems in the Grafton area. 

Here is some of her work for the 'Free Air' campaign, a proposal devised to encourage nurses to walk to work or use public transport in exchange for a free pair of nike airs.

Note that this is currently a conceptual proposal as part of Emma's Postgraduate Research, and not a live campaign:

STP workshops

The sustainable Transport work stream, championed by project managers Phil Schulze and Ian D'Young and run in collaboration with the DHW lab; recently held three workshops with staff and the public. The workshops were set up as forum for discussing ways of improving transport to and from the hospital campus, with a special focus on public transport options.The three workshops have been full, and has been a great opportunity for the sustainable transport project to understand the stories of our people travelling to and from the campus.

Take a look at a few photos below:

Farewell!

Recently, two of our Lab staff have taken overseas trips to Europe. We want to wish both Jess and Emily all the best on their trips and we are incredibly grateful for all the hard work they have put in over the past 6 months. Emily has been key to pushing forward design research and user engagement for the food offering at the hospital and the new Oncology building project. Jess has supported work that looks at redesigning public spaces of the hospital, namely the hospital pharmacy and Transition Lounge. Thank you both!

We look forward to hearing about your travels!