M8 Hospital Bed Wins Australian International Design Award

Anthony Batley, Research and Development Manager at Howard Wright Limited speaks to Open Forum's Kate Williamson about the M8 Medical Bed; winner of the Australian International Design Award of the Year 2010.

Coming up with a great design is not easy. What do you think made the M8 medical bed possible? Back in 2005 Howard Wright engaged in Better by Design (BBD) – a specialist program within New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. This opened our eyes to how design enabled we were at that stage, and how design enabled we could become. Up until that point we were really doing a lot of customization for our customers but BBD demonstrated to us that we needed to be more proactive and totally committed to developing our design expertise and design leadership in our field.

One of the BBD recommendations was to recruit a world class Industrial Designer to assist us in this transition and work towards design leadership. What did the industrial designer bring in to the mix? The Industrial Designer opened our eyes to extensive end user research, human factors and ergonomics and just how important these are in our field of Medical products. It took around a year for us to find our feet and develop our own unique design language but this has really given clarity to what we do and how we go about developing a new product.

What did the design language embody? The design language is built around three key words - SIMPLE, SMART and HUMAN. This means that our design approach focuses on understanding human problems and finding simple, smart & human solutions to those problems. Simple means that it is practical, smart is innovative and elegant. Human relates to intuition and empathy. How does this work in practice? Our design language is like the DNA for our design process. It ties together our products in terms of consistent form, function and experience.

Everything we do must meet these key requirements. We instinctively question why we are doing something or how can we modify the design or component such that it does fit our design language. In terms of human factors, patient handling was something you cared for? Our purpose is to make human care easier and minimizing patient handling is one of the first things written into the brief. Medical professionals are often injured at work maneuvering patients and this we find unacceptable.

Manual lifting or positioning of patients is something we have worked hard to minimize or eliminate with the M8 – the platform dimensions are suited to a varying range of patient shapes, sizes and gender and all the functions are electrically powered so the patient can be positioned without manual intervention. And the imaging capabilities. How does this work? The entire deck of the M8 is radiolucent and the base is asymmetric so that a C-Arm Image Intensifier can be placed around the patient.

This enables X-ray to project through the patient and deck to the receiver that converts the image to digital display. Previously Radiographers have had to move Intensive Care patients to a special fluoroscopy table which is both a manual handling hazard and causes discomfort to the patient. In the development process we worked with leading Radiographers in New Zealand and realized early on that with thoughtful design and creative engineering we were able to integrate this capability into the M8 Intensive Care bed. What did Better by Design mean for you and your role within the company?

The change from an Engineering Company to one that totally embraces design has excited and motivated everyone – it was exactly what we needed at that time and put real direction into where we were going as a Company. For R&D it was the addition of Industrial Design complimenting our strong Mechanical Engineering skill set that really grew our depth of knowledge in our area. I have enjoyed the change and it really has resulted in a fresh and exciting approach to problem solving and new product development in an area that helps people. How has the company changed? The company has gone through enormous change and everyone has embraced this new direction and new way of doing things. It is a totally different environment now with everyone being design conscious and very aware of what design can do for business.

It is not something just written on the wall, it has become the culture. Everyone is excited and motivated about the possibilities and constantly seeking insights for the next innovation. Winning Australia’s top design award also means a lot. Absolutely! In New Zealand our Brand is well known but we are relatively new to the Australian market and I’m sure winning this award will be great for our Brand exposure. Also winning an award such as this means we’re on the right track and is reassuring that we can compete at an international level. Anthony Batley is Research and Development Manager at Howard Wright Limited. Anthony has been with the company for 9 years and holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Canterbury University.