Design Lab with Bon Ku

Liz Salmi is Senior Strategist of Dissemination for OpenNotes at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In this role, Liz helps hospitals and health systems understand the changing nature of patient-clinician communication in the digital age, and interpret and implement research emerging from the “open notes” movement. After being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at age 29, Liz immediately pu...

Guidione Machava is an entrepreneur, designer and community builder. He has experience leading teams, coaching designers, and creating together products and services that positively impact people’s lives. He works across diverse industries and sectors, bringing early ideas and concepts to life for World Bank projects, scrappy startups and nonprofits in Africa. He is the author of “Design Sutra'',...

Katie McCurdy is a design consultant, autoimmune patient and founder of Pictal Health. After years of struggling to communicate about her own mysterious symptoms, Katie created a new way for people to tell their health stories visually, so they feel heard and understood as they work with their doctors to get the right diagnosis and treatment. She’s also spent a decade joyfully using visual communi...

Larry Chu, MD is a Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Director of the Stanford Anesthesia Informatics and Media (AIM) Lab. Dr. Chu is an NIH-funded clinical researcher and is Executive Director of Stanford Medicine X, the world's longest-running and most-discussed academic program on patient-centered emerging technology and medicine. He has written eight books, over 5...

Mokena Makeka was raised in Maseru, Lesotho and New York. He is an accomplished architect, artist, curator, designer, global leader, scholar and urbanist. He is at the forefront of thinking on contemporary inclusive African Cities. Mokena studied architecture at the University of Cape Town and has executive leadership qualifications from the Harvard Kennedy School, Oxford University and Wits Unive...

Michael Ngigi is the co-studio Lead of ThinkPlace Kenya where he leads a team of designers drawn from over 8 different countries. He’s passionate about Africa and unlocking the potential of the continent through design thinking. Michael has traveled across Africa understanding the different cultures and connecting people with solutions to their challenges. Early in his career he acknowledged the p...

Antionette D. Carroll is the founder and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, a nonprofit social enterprise designing healthy and racially equitable communities for Black and Latinx populations through education and training programs, community engagement consulting and open-sourced tools. Creative Reaction Lab is a movement challenging racial inequities in the education, media, health and healthcare, an...

Ben Branson is the Founder of Seedlip and Æcorn Drinks, the world’s first distilled non-alcoholic spirits and aperitifs. His mission is two fold: Solve the dilemma of ‘what to drink when you’re not drinking’ and continue his family’s 300 years of farming heritage. With offices in the Chilterns, Los Angeles and Sydney, Seedlip is now available in 29 cities including New York, Barcelona, Shanghai &...

Katherine Darnstadt is the founder of Latent Design, a boutique architecture and urban design firm leveraging civic innovation and social impact to design more equitable spaces and systems. Since founding her practice in 2010, Katherine and her firm have prototyped new design systems to advance urban agriculture, support small business, create spaces for youth makers, advance building innovation a...

Selected by Fast Company as a Master of Design and one of 50 Most Influential Designers, Kathleen Brandenburg is an internationally recognized founder, thought leader, educator and speaker on the global stage—from Delhi to Hong Kong to the Mayo Clinic. Named a “Creative Maverick,” Kathleen has devoted her career to elevating design as a strategic value for business, organizations, and society. An...

Maggie Breslin is the director of The Patient Revolution, an action and advocacy movement for careful and kind care. She and her team work towards a vision of a healthcare future defined by unhurried conversations, seeing people in all their complexity, and care plans that make intellectual, emotional, and practical sense. Maggie has spent 15+ years as a designer and researcher in the healthcare s...

Cliff Kuang is a user-experience designer at Google and author of User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play, which was called a “tour de force” by the New York Times and was also named an Amazon Best Book of 2019. Previously, he was head of UX and product at Fast Company; the founder of Fast Company’s design site, Co. Design; and an editor at Wired....

Meet Rachael Dietkus. She’s a clinical social worker who has dedicated her career to trauma responsive practices in design. After a 10-year career working with social justice and human rights non-profits, she pursued a Master of Social Work and worked at Veterans Affairs across the patient advocacy, planning and construction, and housing and homelessness arenas. Since 2016, she has been working in...

Andrew M. Ibrahim is an Assistant Professor of Surgery, Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and Chief Medical Officer at HOK, a global design and architecture firm. He completed his undergraduate and medical degrees education both with Honors at Case Western Reserve University with a year of coursework at University College London and The Bartlett School of Architecture. In...

Humans are an indoor species; we spend about 90% of our time inside buildings. What makes a building sick or a living room healthy? Explore the science of indoor spaces with Emily Anthes, the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. Emily and Bon talk about the design of modern hospitals, evidenced-based design and tips on crea...

In this special holiday edition of Design Lab, Dr. Mike Natter (from Episode 3) joins us as our return guest! In this fun meandering conversation, our producer Rob Pugliese asks Bon and Mike about their holiday plans, TikTok, quarantine puppies, Jeopardy, reducing pandemic stress and so much more. Enjoy and happy holidays! 

Miya Osaki and Tina Park solve wicked problems in health care through design. They are partners at NYC-based Diagram, a design studio that’s fully dedicated to the healthcare industry. In their spare time, Miya and Tina host “Ya, No”, an engaging podcast that explores new ideas in health care. In their work, they use role-playing, narrative storytelling and participatory design to improve the expe...

Meet Emily Silverman. She’s an academic hospitalist in San Francisco and the founder of The Nocturnists, an independent medical storytelling community. Stories are her design medium. Emily has created a platform that invites healthcare workers to open up and share their stories, the good and the bad. She creates space for real talk, to bring taboos out into the open and transform the culture of me...

Meet Lesley-Ann Noel. She's a Professor of Design and her research practice is guided by an emancipatory philosophy. Lesley introduces design to nontraditional audiences and has presented her work all over the world: Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, Brazil, Germany, and France. Originally from Trinidad, she moved to Brazil to study Industrial Design and earned her PhD at North Carolina State University....

BJ Miller, a palliative care physician, wants to redesign how we die. BJ is the co-author of A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death, his TED talk has over 11 million views and he’s been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, Tim Ferris and Krista Tippet. Bon asks BJ about the role of design in reimagining the dying experience, helping people navigate illness during...

Craig Wilkins is an architect, activist, artist, author and academic. His work focuses on the intersection of design and social justice. He is the creative director of the Wilkins Project and a lecturer in architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Craig, a leading scholar on African Americans in architecture, won the Cooper Hewitt National Des...

Meet Giorgia Lupi. She’s an information designer and a partner at the global design studio Pentagram. Giorgia uses data as her materials for design — she is on a mission to make data more humane. The MOMA in NYC acquired her data visualization of soft power as one of its permanent collections and Fast Company named her one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018. Giorgia’s TED Talk on...

John is a legend in design. Although he currently defines himself as a technologist, John is also an artist, educator, graphic designer, computer scientist and engineer. He is internationally known for his talks, books and thought leadership on the intersection of technology and design. His diverse career spans from teaching at MIT Media Lab to being the president of the Rhode Island School of Des...

Food can be as powerful as medications in improving health outcomes. But most of us struggle to eat a healthy diet. Nicole Marquis is on a mission to make plant-based food accessible to everyone, even meat-obsessed humans like Bon. She is the founder and CEO of the plant-based fast casual restaurant HipCityVeg that has locations in Philadelphia and D.C. Listen to how Nicole’s vegan restaurants hav...

Meet George Aye. He uses human-centered design to advance equity and creates solutions that improve society. He is a co-founder and principal at the Chicago based Greater Good Studio. His work spans diverse sectors from criminal justice to healthcare. Listen to Bon and George talk about how “gut checks” can inform our everyday decisions, their Asian identities, George’s journey to becoming a desig...