What do we as health tech designers at Lantum owe the world?

Designers often base their career choice on an altruistic desire to help solve problems and deliver answers to the world in a more digestible and appealing way. At the very least, we’re responsible for the aesthetic, knowing that this is used as a barometer to judge a website’s credibility, as well as producing experiences that are friendly to a user, knowing that people won’t return if they have a bad encounter. But beyond this, and far more difficult to achieve, we are invited to revolutionise our landscape and inspire positive change. 

One designer who has reached seminal design status many times is Milton Glaser. In 1954 he founded Pushpin Studios together with Reynold Ruffins, Seymour Chwasta and Edward Sorel. They ran the company for twenty years during which it became a pioneer for worldwide graphic design. 

“In his concise and brilliant way, he’s able to say something that in someone else’s hands is ordinary but in his becomes special and utterly clear.”

_{Paul Goldberger (Dean of New School)}

In 1974, Milton Glaser Inc. was established, which coincided with the time the image of New York City was deteriorating. It was overrun by crime, evoking perceptions of fear and causing businesses to relocate from the city elsewhere. It had lost its glamorous appeal and as a result tourism was severely suffering. The New York mayor attempted to boost the city’s spirit with campaigns to promote tourism and eventually commissioned Milton Glaser to help solve the problem. 

Glaser pondered the brief and, based on the advertising campaign developed by Wells Rich Green, he submitted his first design for the commission to the New York State Commerce Department. Later, as he took a ride in the back of a taxi, creativity struck and he sketched the current “I love New York” logo. It was launched in 1977 and meant to run for a few months.

It has now become the most frequently imitated logo in history. It was created for free and remained free for use for the first 15 years, after which it was trademarked by the state. No one ever anticipated it would stay trendy for over 40 years. 

Tech start-ups often attempt to do a similar thing; disrupt industries that they perceive as broken to ultimately encourage better behaviour and ways to live. And hopefully they look to the future to seek how their solution could be sustainable. 

Just like New York City, the NHS as an entity is under acute threats of its own. It faces many challenges, one in particular being the high fees which are spent on locum agencies to staff GPs. We at Lantum have commissioned ourselves to help decipher and solve this problem. We’ve introduced a new type of marketplace connecting practices directly to locums, dispelling the barrier of the traditional agency middleman. Like Glaser, we’ve gone back to the drawing board, to expand on our manifesto. We realised that the marketplace was only solving part of the problem and that we could help create even better relationships between practices and staff by providing total workforce management.

We have digitised and automated a suite of tools including Rocketpay, which pays workers the next day, therefore purging the widely broadcast pain of not being paid on time. As our CEO Melissa Morris has declared, we’re on a mission to save the NHS 1 billion a year: because that’s how much it would amount to if everyone in the NHS used Lantum for its staffing solutions.

But a strong intention is not enough to deliver a remarkable idea. The purpose of the “I love New York” campaign may not have been mastered if it was expressed via another medium, simply explaining to people that they should be united. To truly transcend beyond the noise, it needs to be delivered sublimely. Good design is the key - it acts as the translator, intrinsically presenting the message in an easily understandable manner that facilitates connection. 

Glaser listened to the problem in New York City and interpreted it easily, because as his own audience; he felt it. But we cannot only look within ourselves as designers of tech - more than ever there’s a requirement to spend time with people for whom we’re transcribing, and to inherently adopt their frustrations and joys so we may truly empathise with them. As we build a platform to unite clinicians and organisations, our core aim is to create relationships with them first. Only then will design be a constructive messenger of our mission. 

We’ve seen the value of well executed design and the success it brings to the Airbnbs and Apples of the world. We recognise that design is a critical component to their business mix, and thus its power to be the differentiator.

How are we design-focused at Lantum? Design thinking is baked into company conversation from every day stand-ups to annual OKRs. It is led, at the heart, by our users, followed by the concept of collaboration across all departments from inception through to execution, so when something is built and released, we’re all behind it and proud of what we’ve created. And if it’s not quite polished or doesn’t achieve what we hoped at first, we’ll craft it together to make sure it succeeds next time.

We know it’s a process, it’s not as simple as designing a logo in the back of a taxi, and with greater understanding and consideration for whom we’re creating, we’ll always find new problems to solve. 

By continuing to respect the design thinking philosophy on a granular level, we aim to employ the perfect level of innovation versus experience to delight and exceed the expectations of our clinicians and organisations, articulating on a higher level the potential of our revolutionary mission to help solve the staffing challenges of the NHS and designing the change required to do so. Our job is never truly finished, but continue to listen and hopefully soon we will be able to survey the landscape and the way we have positively influenced it for the future. For it is not only a fleeting campaign, but a designer’s everlasting responsibility.