Good traditions must be kept alive. And so, for the second year in a row, I am participating in London Design Festival 2010.

As you would recall in my last blog on the festival last year, I questioned the absence of medical technology representation in this prestigious festival, which celebrates London as the creative capital of the world. This independent event is held every year to highlight the talents of designers, from graphic designers and 3D prototypers to architects, web developers, scientists and engineers from various fields.

In 2009, we did a show for Nissan Design Europe, which highlighted their electric car. Initially, the aim of the design collective is to highlight medical device innovations for this year’s London Design Festival. Informed by my conversations with GE Healthcare's engineers and Intel Digital Health's anthropologists about the social implications of their medical innovations, we decided to explore not just the idea of wires, silicon chips and plastic implants biologically healing a person, but to take it up one level and explore the idea of objects as a means to heal. This will be discussed in an event – one of hundreds organised by the festival throughout London from 18 to 26 September 2010 – to be held at University College London (UCL).

It will feature speakers from Médecins Sans Frontières, 3G Doctor, Being In Rhythm and duckrabbit.

The question that we'll be addressing is: Can we create objects that can heal a wounded society?

An object makes the person, informs his identity, and facilitates a sociality around the person. We use objects such as the iPod to anesthetise our pain. Can objects also ‘heal’? How do the disciplines such as design, medical technology, anthropology, music, multimedia and photography construct an artifact that puts ‘healing’ and ‘empathy’ at the heart of it?

Care as tinkering: the 3G Doctor example

Where medical device is concerned, our emphasis for this festival is on disruptive technology, and its role in facilitating the move in digital health from e-compliance to e-concordance, where the patients are responsible for the record-keeping of dosage and health conditions. Thus, we invited David Doherty, founder of 3G Doctor and also an alumnus of UCL Medical School, to talk about how his medical insight informs his research and design of a mobile video conferencing tool using 3G smartphones for patient-physician interaction and a secure, accessible medical record system.

He is also going to be speaking at Informa Telecom’s Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit 2010 on 3G services for healthcare, aimed at telecoms providers and healthcare ICT operators and stakeholders.

Disruptive technologies such as the mobile phone and social media are ubiquitous and, in certain cases, are the logical alternative to expensive, energy-guzzling devices that are hooked on call center services, huge telecommunications contracts and costly after-sales maintenance. However, Doherty told me that the inability of the healthcare providers to adopt disruptive technologies is largely down to the inability to provide continuing care – in this instance, the right ICT platform. I have witnessed how my GP struggled with a painfully slow server while filing in my case into what looked like a basic, DOS-based record system. What chance has he got with Skype? And that’s way before the ‘privacy’ issue comes in.

The imminent demise of the phone-based service NHS Direct, however, could be a boon to mobile providers. But to apply digital technologies to healthcare is not unlike working with surgical tools: before we get to use the objects, it requires us to approach thinking as tinkering, design as hypothesis. This is the premise of our event. I look forward to hearing what Doherty has to say at London Design Festival 2010 about how he puts his imagination and expertise to good use.

Of course, a more in-depth blog on 3G Doctor and the significance of smartphones in mobile health will follow soon. This write-up will also feature my conversation with Prof Peter Bentley, the inventor of the iStethoscope, the health ICT researchers I spoke to at the Digital Health Agenda meeting organised in July by the European Commission, and also a talk by Ben Goldacre on at The Open Tech 2010 open source summit.

“Aesthetics as a means to heal” will take place at The Pearson Lecture Theatre, University College London, Gower Street, on 24 September 2010, from 6.30pm to 9pm. It is one of over 200 events and installations to be held across London for the London Design Festival 2010. Open to the public, this London Design Festival event is free. Register at http://sojournposse.eventbrite.com