Machines For Living

Obama's Stimulus Planners: Design Jobs lead to Electronic Health Records

A growing chorus of politicians is raising concerns over the inclusion of projects that would create green collar jobs (alternative energy and transit projects) and those that would finally bring about the digitization of medical records, because they are not "shovel-ready" and so would not create jobs anytime soon.  Rep. Baron Hill (Ind) argues to the Washington Post, ""If we're going to call it a stimulus package, it has to be stimulating and has to be stimulating now. I think there are members of our caucus who are trying to create a Christmas tree out of this."  This is a red herring argument in the case of electronic medical records just as much as it is with regard to green collar jobs.

The design of a technical infrastructure for portable electronic medical records that includes all health care providers, consumers and researchers is as massive an undertaking as was the creation of the interstate highway system in the 50s, and will require thousands of design jobs.

The design of a technical infrastructure for portable electronic medical records is as massive an undertaking as was the creation of the interstate highway system in the 50s, and will require thousands of design jobs.

Essential Design Concepts: Ergon

Design as a discipline gets so bound up with particular domains (architecture, software design, product design, industrial design, urban planning, ergonomics, quality management, etc) that fundamental concepts of design can sometimes get obscured.  One of the most fundamental design concepts is ergon, which is a Greek term meaning work or activity.  You probably guessed that the word ergonomics is rooted in this term.  But ergon is not limited to workplaces, as is ergonomics.

An ergon is an activity or function essential to any person or thing.  It is a concept as old as Aristotle, who wrote that just as a knife has an ergon of cutting, so a flute-player or sculptor each have a distinctive ergon.  

Good design always requires first analyzing activities to find the essential ergon, and then designing artifacts (e.g. buildings, software, processes, etc) that don't inhibit or distract from this ergon, but  that get out of the way and enable one's ergon to be done well.  The key concept in ethics since Aristotle, virtue, is defined in his Ethics as "excellence in performing one's ergon".  So, whereas a virtuous, quality knife is one the cuts well (it performs its ergon well), so the virtue of a flute-player or a sculptor is to perform their distinctive ergon well.  The designer is thus in the business of enabling people to flourish by performing well the activities and functions essential to them, and sustainable businesses are built on products based on such designs.