Lorna Ross, the Chief Innovation Officer at VHI Health and Well-Being, discusses her career and work at DARPA, Motorola, MIT Media Lab, the Rhode Island School of Design, Mayo Clinic, and Accenture. You’ll learn about how her stellar design career unfolded, ways to get into designing for health, and system design in healthcare. Show Host: Dawan Stanford.   Show Summary Lorna grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, where she studied textiles and fashion design, with the intention to have a career in the clothing industry. In the course of continuing her career in fashion, she approached her local bank for a loan and was told the bank didn’t give loans to designers. Realizing that she had few business skills, she returned to school, this time in London, where she entered an industrial design program with a focus on computers and technology. She had her first foray into wearable tech with a project where she designed a glove that was also a phone. As she was finishing up her degree, Lorna was picked up by a research lab in Palo Alto led by Paul Allen, who eventually became a co-founder of Microsoft. This first job set the benchmark for the quality of the work environments she has looked for during her entire career. At her first wearable tech conference in the early 1990s, Lorna was introduced to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) via a presentation by Dick Urban. Their work felt like science fiction to her and seemed radical and experimental, and she found it fascinating. At that same conference, Lorna gave a presentation and afterwards, was immediately offered a job at DARPA, which she accepted. Lorna worked with many of the big names in military manufacturing, where she reviewed programs, critiquing them from a user perspective. After DARPA, she took a break before continuing her design work and her work in wearable tech at Motorola. She moved on to MIT Media Lab a couple of years later. By this time, Lorna had been working in wearables for ten years, and was wanting a new challenge. By chance, she attended a meeting about the healthcare crisis, and a light bulb went off and she knew she wanted to turn her focus and work to healthcare. Her attempts to push for innovation in healthcare led to her being asked to run the design studio at the Mayo Clinic. She has been a driving force of healthcare innovation for more than two decades now. Learn how Lorna has been at the forefront of creating healthcare design and reforming the healthcare industry, and her predictions on opportunities for designers in healthcare. Find out why she believes that medicine will change before the healthcare system changes, her take on virtual healthcare and the need for immediate healthcare, and her thoughts on the melding of AI and human healthcare.   Listen in to learn: How Lorna landed her first job in design at DARPA Lorna’s view on why user-centric is one of the most important facets of design What Lorna found out about the unpredictability of people’s behaviors How she fell into her job at Motorola and why she left Julian Vincent and his role as Lorna’s mentor at Media Lab How Lorna became the “Florence Nightingale” of healthcare design The future of AI and what role Lorna thinks machines will play in healthcare Why our healthcare system needs to be more meticulous about, and value, documentation in the healthcare system The role of system design in our healthcare system today   Our Guest’s Bio Lorna Ross has thirty years of professional experience working on strategic design research activity, particularly in innovation lab environments. Over the past two decades, she's held creative leadership positions in five innovation groups that span a range of industry sectors from technology to healthcare. Her career has thrived at the intersection of design, science, technology, and industry, and she's an expert in planning, managing, and executing speculative research activity. She's ef