Encouraging creativity in medical design contexts via a two-stage briefing process

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Briefing designers to encourage creativity in medical or healthcare contexts is challenging, because of significant additional constraints. Previous work on the content of design briefs was analysed, and seven key scales for design brief characteristics were identified. Each scale ranged from the more normative, when targeting iterative improvement, to the more radical, when pursuing significant innovation. We present an action research design project that successfully navigated the additional constraints of a medical context. We evaluate the success of the project as having been dependent on a briefing process that operated at the more radical ends of these scales and suggest that similar benefits might be obtained in future, through a deliberate re-configuration of what would conventionally be pre-brief phases, into what we term ‘primary briefing’. A primary brief founds the use of design itself and has the secondary brief, or conventional product design brief, as its explicit aim. This is a technique for translating relevant aspects of design research techniques into commercial practice, towards ensuring strategic coherence.