Ed Matthews
A lifelong engineer, inspired by a broad range of experiences in industrial placements during his engineering degree and his work with arts-trained designers at the RCA, Ed Matthews pursued a career in design consultancy in order to be involved in a rich variety of interesting and challenging design work. He became 'the Designer's Design Engineer', built up a team of engineer-designers to bring concepts through to manufacture, and was instrumental in a culture change in product design in the UK. Engineers are now involved in the creative concept-generation process, rather than retrospectively interpreting the aesthetic concepts for production.
Ed Matthews subsequently moved into technology consulting, working with designers, engineers and scientists to bridge different cultures, championing the value of people-centred design that exploits useful technologies, rather than products designed simply to generate markets around technology. He was drawn towards medical products because they have to be engineered properly, and because in addition to generating wealth they generally enhance well-being and civilisation.
At the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Ed is motivated by working with teams of intelligent, creative and highly skilled people from a variety of disciplines on interesting projects for industry partners and research councils. Researching and building up a solid evidence base through sophisticated interactions with users and stakeholders is key to the projects undertaken. This approach leads to solid, worthwhile design propositions that are then defined, developed and delivered.
Ed Matthews has a broad range of research interests. Some of the work is highly exploratory, in challenging new fields of design for mental health (environments, systems and products informed by an understanding of the clinical and emotional issues in areas such as dementia and autism). Ed is also involved with a major research programme, DOME, to understand the patient journey through elective surgery in hospitals, in order to make design interventions to reduce the incidence of errors compromising patient safety.
Another programme has investigated a future ambulance system and proposed a new structure of integrated pre-hospital healthcare, avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions through a system of improved ambulances, small paramedic response vehicles for non-emergency treatments, standardised equipment, treatment spaces and layouts and improved operations management. A working demonstrator unit is currently being built.
