Mizue Hayashi
Japan
CAREER Enrolled in April 2008; Completed master’s degree in March 2010
I studied architecture as an undergraduate. I was involved in a project to design a hospital that provides care for the terminally ill. As I worked, I realized that the design of the physical structure restricted the experiences available to the patients and their families. This raised many questions in my mind. I decided to get involved in service design at KMD and to focus on design that can adapt flexibly to people’s lives, in particular.
I joined the “Medical Project” under Professor Naohito Okude and did fieldwork in collaboration with a university hospital, doctors association, and local practitioners to identify the challenges faced by local health care. For example, I accompanied doctors who provide home medical care on their visits, observed what they did and tried to identify the latent issues that the doctor, patient, family, and others were perhaps not yet aware of themselves. I then applied the design thinking approach to analyze my findings and designed an application to encourage collaboration among everyone involved in home medical care, as well as a web service to support patients after their discharge. We established a consortium in partnership with companies and began to roll out the services that we designed to the general public.
I currently work in an NTT lab in a group that wants to utilize the data collected in M2M interactions (communications between computers) for the betterment of the community and society at large. Right now I am analyzing the features of group communications and developing the technologies required to facilitate and energize real-world communities. In the future, I hope to develop technology for the health care and nursing fields, and to use that technology to create services.
The knowledge I gained at KMD has given me the foundation from which to achieve my goal of contributing to the world.
(This article was written in March 2012.)