Sections
Principles. Thom Huxtable's portfolio of work is underpinned by 5 key principles. Below you can see how these principles manifest in the work he has designed, guided and built.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
IDEO
Amazon Health
Medtronic
CareScout
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The Government of Dubai
Sanofi
SoulCycle
Cedar Health
Compassus
Northwell Health
+ Many more
Clients & Partners
Experience
Building MyLO a platform to support family caregivers & their loved ones [Current]
Creative Director of CareScout, reimagining aging and end of life experiences [2022-2024]
Design Director in the Health domain at IDEO [2012-2022]
Frog Design, Interaction Designer, Amsterdam [2012]
Hyper Island, Stockholm, Sweden – Interactive Art Direction [2011-2012]
Crown, London, UK – Designing Retail interiors, live events and exhibitions [2006-2011]
University of Leeds, UK – BA Hons Graphic Design [2003-2006]
Born & raised in Glastonbury, Somerset, UK [In the 80's somewhere]
About. Award Winning Design Director & Interaction Designer. Philosophy for Design in Health & Portfolio of Work, 2024. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York City.
Thom is currently a cofounder of MyLO
MyLO is creating a supportive environment for family caregivers and older adults through community, thoughtful resources, and innovative therapeutic approaches such as horticulture therapy to enhance quality of life.
Email: thom@thomhuxtable.com
P.1 Through elevating the voices of frontline staff to the role of partners in innovation, we can find solutions to many of our greatest challenges.
Bloomberg Philanthropy
A platform to encourage the people of India to speak up for the issues they want addressed most thorugh the Bloomberg Philanthropy program.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
A child life specialist describes her process of helping children and their families dealing with chronic and terminal conditions. The insights from these workshops drove the designs for a new inpateint room based around wonder and play.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
In partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 15 of New York City's biggest hospital networks collaborated with the aim to better manage of future pandemics.
Building on the knowledge of true experts.
Giving the unheard a voice.
Driving collaboration between 15 of New York City's largest hospital networks through design.
P.2 The role of the designer is to translate and scale what others often miss. For example you only need to walk the halls of a hospital to see how staff, families and patients have "hacked" the space to make it run more efficiently, deliver clinical excellence and be more comfortable.
Cedar Health
Analogous research often helps reveal new ways of looking at old problems. This was the case with Cedar Health a medical billing company trying to increase the response to paying medical bills.
The team spoke with two FBI hostage negotiators and learned how they use methodologies and tactics to help hostage takers in a high stress moment make better decisions about how to move forwards in a more calm and controlled manner.
Various
Inspired by Jane Fulton-Suri's book "Thoughtless Acts" we can find many inspirations in the hacks and adjustments or natural behaviors presented within our health care systems and services. These clearly illuminate possible design improvements to many aspects of our current healthcare landscape.
Learning from FBI hostage negotiators.
Thoughtless acts in healthcare.
Building a diabetes tool around user behaviors.
Sanofi
Through a human centered design process the team was able to create a set of experiences for a new range of diabetes monitors that mapped to users behaviors and coached them to follow healthier habits with the aim of being a little better each day.
P.3 For better or worse health & healthcare in general has become transactional, sterile and ruthlessly efficient delivered with calculation, measurement and control (a rationalization). Our bodies, our values and our health however are not simple mechanisms easily explained, reflected or understood in these terms. Good design adds a layer of storytelling & magic to a product, service or experience which leads to increased adherence, a sense of control & identity within a system and drives better outcomes for all.
Robby Klein / Contour / Getty Images
6Degrees
In collaboration with Kevin Bacon and his team we created a new vision and set of designs for the 6Degrees charitable platform aimed at raising money for a broad range of initiatives though viral campaigns such as the ice bucket challenge for the ALS Association.
Medtronic
The team designed a closed loop system that maps to a users lifestyle through the ability to create personalized presets and alert patterns.
Golf Arcoss
After completing an initial round of research with amateur and semi-pro golfers the team designed the sensor hardware and the digital platform that synced with it to show golfers realtime statistics about their game and ways to improve it. The Product is now stocked as an affiliate in the apple store with 20,000+ 5 star reviews.
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Quite literally a dream project to prototype and test visions for the inpatient room of the future in a children's hospital based around wonder and play. The team created 4 full scale prototypes built out of foamcore to test hypotheses with users from both the clinical and family perspectives. The research culminated in a vision. The Ta_Da Room operated in a dynamic fashion allowing for many modes of interaction, shifting to facilitate users needs over the course of a day or course of treatment, seamlessly, almost like magic.
Evolving a successful charity platform.
Designing a closed loop system for people living with type one diabetes.
The only real-time golf tracking product in the apple store.
Reimagining the inpatient room of the future in a children's hospital around wonder and play.
P.4 Foundational to a strong healthcare system is how we think and design for relationships, transitions, empathy and equity.
Northwell Health
By analyzing and visually representing Northwell Health's billing data the team was able to help patients find doctors in new and powerful ways whilst at the same time allowing LEadership to see valuable referral networks within their systems enabling them to hone their service offerings and mitigate gaps in coverage for their patient population.
The Center for New York City Neighborhoods
The team was tasked with creating a website and tool to help residents of New York City's coastal neighborhoods calculate and plan for flood risk mitigation strategies and to avoid brutally rising insurance premiums. The work really begged the question can we really be healthy if the environment is not?
Ping MD
Way back in 2012 the team designed an early version of a telehealth product for PingMD that connected people with young children to pediatric doctors directly through an app. The platform later was acquired by Kipu Health.
Compassus
Key to this work is the insight that people felt less safe at home with homecare than in hospital as the interaction and contact with care providers was fleeting and mommentary. The team aimed to create a tool to help homecare providers augment themselves and their reach to their clients. A virtual rounding of sorts and an kind of portal that allowed daily meaningful connection with their patients and families.
Supporting residents of neighborhoods devastated by hurricane Sandy.
Revealing valuable networks within a hospital system.
Telehealth for parents with young children.
Augmenting the best of Home Care providers.
Driving efficiencies into consumer healthcare.
Amazon Health
The team partnered with Amazon health to understand and design the next iteration of amazon health based around immediate telehealth capbilities and codified packages of care for the most common illnesses within the US. In other words making health shoppable.
Medical devices inspired by nature.
Helping a successful startup scale.
Creating a place to design the future today.
A zine about creativity.
The Government of Dubai (Area2071)
Through collaboration with the Government of Dubai and Bjake Ingels Group the team was tasked with Creating a new kind of space within the government buildings that could support and incubate some of the worlds leading founders in sectors ranging from mobility, governnance, housing, healthcare, technology and space. The collaboration saw Area 2071 launched as a beacon of middle eastern innovation and vision.
Experiments in AI
What if medical devices and or equipment aesthetically mapped more closely to nature or jewelry rather than what was in the market today was the question Thom explored with initial experiments in AI image generation.
I'm Not The Creative Type
A zine that explores the edges of creativity, creative process and method which was freely distributed in and around New York City. Topics included titles like "You can prototype anything" and "Play is work".
SoulCycle
The team worked closely with the Founders of SoulCycle to take their successful startup to scale though refined user experience and user flows within their digital products. The work enabled Soul Cycle to 5x their revenue in just a few short months.
P.5 Design in health & healthcare is a verb. It's about doing something. It can be a way of looking at old problems in new ways, it can be the defining of the right questions to ask, it can lead to unfair advantage in the market, it can unlock key stakeholders, it can improve patient outcomes, it can be the space one needs to see the future, it can be the realization of a vision.
© All rights reserved. 2024.
Cheers :)
Ethos
Anna Greenberg
Selma Durand
Naz Mirzhai
Mani Nilchiani
Fuzzy Wobble
Maggie Chok
George Hastings
Ross Sokolovski
Dom Tan
David Goligorsky
David Boardman
Seb Park
Paul Bennet
Gregory Perez
Elvina Hewitt
Andrea Dineen
Tim Peck
Leif Huff
Maura Cass
Danny Salvatori
Stephanie Briones
Ariel Meyer
Njoki Gitahi
Statement
Thankful for these collaborators
Dario Buzzini
Juho Paviaanen
Jeremy Innes Hopkins
Zahin Ali
Adam Hilborn
Stine Larson
Zach Hobbs
Sash Chertok
Kevin Whipple
Juan Astorio
Lin Yang
HJ Kwon
Bailey Richardson
Shauna Carey
Josh Axelrod
Kelli Neuwhoner
Dan Eils
+ Many many more
The jazz drummer analogoulsly speaking represents the clearest model for leadership that Thom follows. Its an abstract idea of what leadership could and can be.
Through this idea Thom can confidently understand when to be front of stage leading or where to be allow others (experts) to do their jobs in ways in which they uniquely positioned to do (i.e play their solos).
A jazz drummer is by nature a musician of collaboration that can find space where others can't, can give space that others need and can knit together what might seem complex and abstract in ways that make harmonious and pleasurable outcomes. This for Thom is leadership. This is how Thom Huxtable Leads teams.
The stage Thom Huxtable sets as a leader in design is one of shared intellectual space, shared responsibility, shared enjoyment and one of shared success.
On leadership. The jazz drummer. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes leading, sometimes leaving space.
Make others successful
Design with empathy
Be Inspired
Believe in better
Prototype
Have some fun too, life's too short
The jazz drummer analogoulsly speaking represents the clearest model for leadership that Thom follows. Its an abstract idea of what leadership could and can be.
Through this idea Thom can confidently understand when to be front of stage leading or where to be allow others (experts) to do their jobs in ways in which they uniquely positioned to do (i.e play their solos).
A jazz drummer is by nature a musician of collaboration that can find space where others can't, can give space that others need and can knit together what might seem complex and abstract in ways that make harmonious and pleasurable outcomes. This for Thom is leadership. This is how Thom Huxtable Leads teams.
The stage Thom Huxtable sets as a leader in design is one of shared intellectual space, shared responsibility, shared enjoyment and one of shared success.
Statement
On leadership. The jazz drummer. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes leading, sometimes leaving space.