Dr. Marco Bevolo, PhD, Professor, Design Futures at World University of Design
How can the cultural values of our youth create a better healthcare system? Dr. Marco Bevolo, a writer, futurist, consultant and professor of Design Futures at World University of Design, explores digital behaviors and wellness beliefs of younger generations to map out a more positive healthcare future. Driven by mindfulness, he predicts an evolution to a holistic, sustainable, value-based system focused on an individual’s health outcomes.
Dr. Marco Bevolo, PhD, Member of the Board Studies and Adjunct Professor, Design Futures, at World University of Design, is currently an international consultant in Foresight, Futures, and Strategic Design. He is a Philips Design Alumni, 1999-2009. He is Advisory Board Member and advisor to the President of ISISUF, Milan, the art foundation programming FuturDome, Milan, and the only authorized archive of the works of Carlo Belolli, Mary Viera, and Ada Ardessi. In 1999-2009, he was a Director at Philips Design headquarters in the Netherlands.
He led programs in cultural trends, in brand design, and in advanced business development. He directed foresight and strategic design projects for Philips Medical Systems, Philips Semiconductors (now NXP and Nexperia), and joint ventures with SHL Telemedicine, AEG Licht, and more.
As independent consultant, he contributed to the success of selected customers in Europe and Asia, including FIAT Chrysler Automobiles (now Stellantis); Chamber of Commerce of Turin, Italy; Municipality of Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Lighting Design Collective, Helsinki / Madrid; 515/BBB, Turin / Berlin, and more. In this extracurricular capacity, in the lustrum 2010-2016 he has been the Principal Research Urban Futures for Philips Lighting, now Signify, in EMEA and Poland. He has contributed to seminars and events with the Master in Service Design, School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Emerson College, Boston; the UNAM Post- graduate School of Architecture, Mexico City; Domus Academy, Milan; IED, Milan; and more. He has been a 2019 Visiting Scholar at Vancouver Island University, Canada. He had his research published in: Journal of Consumer Marketing; Research in Hospitality Management; Journal of Tourism Futures; World Futures Review; Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, and more. He is the recipient of an Emerald Literati Award and of two ESOMAR Best Conference Paper. He is a Researcher and Lecturer at a leading University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. He earned his PhD on the role of design in generating urban futures at the Graduate School, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Tilburg University. He lives and works in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and in Turin, Italy.
Show Notes
Dr. Marco Bevolo shares his design and education background. [04:25]
An evolution of health care from a sick care focus into a wellness-based approach. [07:33]
How can mindfulness create a different approach to health care technology? [10:58]
What type of healthcare system can deliver individual happiness and social stability? [14:31]
In what ways can we rethink systems and redefine the meaning of health care and wellbeing in the future? [19:53]
How do the younger generations approach health care? [25:52]
Redesigning healthcare through the lens of sustainability. [28:28]
An optimistic future in which a design choice can create a positive impact. [30:22]
Transcript
Bisi Williams 0:00
Hi. I'm Bisi Williams, you're listening to Health2049.
Marco Bevolo 0:07
I see more the human factor in terms of social cultural values, in terms of evolution of beliefs and the evolution of mindsets. So, for example, I see that it's becoming more and more common for millennials to bring mindfulness into the picture. I can think that with mindfulness, a different approach, a more holistic approach, a more wellness-based approach will be injected into the definition of what healthcare is just as an example, and that at that point, all the technology that you have available, will be geared towards a different purpose towards a different set of expectations.
Bisi Williams 1:28
The next 30 years will be the first time in history where senior citizens make up a significant percentage of the human population in the West. This is a fantastic success story due to an unprecedented human ingenuity and the advancement of science. On the other hand, these changes will have a profound effect on our cities and the lives of the people who live in them over the next 30 years. The need to rethink care not just for the elderly, but for the young and all of life too, will have a profound effect for health and wellness for all societies. There'll be a point in all of our lives where we will be vulnerable. The degree to which society looks after its most helpless citizens reflects its values. How will we design our new normal? How will we define health? How will health systems work? We'll get answers to some of these questions and more from my guest, Dr. Marco Bevolo.
Marco is a writer and futurist. He earned his PhD on the role of Design and Generating Urban Futures at the Graduate School faculty at Behavioral and Social Sciences at Tilburg University. He's currently a researcher and lecturer in international leisure management at NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences. He is the founder of Marco Bevolo consulting working for selected customers in Europe, Asia, and including Philips Lighting Design collective. He's also an adjunct professor of Design Futures at the World University of Design. Hi, I'm Bisi Williams. And it is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Marco Bevolo to our show Health2049. Marco, welcome.
Marco Bevolo 3:54
Thank you, Bisi and I'm really delighted to be here and to share this time with you to look forward to the next couple to three decades from the point of view of health care, wellbeing and especially design.
Bisi Williams 4:15
I'm so excited to begin this conversation, you have a very interesting background. Can you tell us how you came to be a designer and a futurist?
Marco Bevolo 4:25
Well, it's a very interesting question that I get a lot. First of all, I must confess that I'm not a real designer. I'm more a sociologist, social scientists working about the future trying to anticipate, to inspire the co-creation of preferable futures with design research methodologies. When my dear mother saw my professional path, unraveling and rolling, she commented because she has been in the same job for 50 years, even longer. She commented, well, it looks like you chose the path of 100 jobs and 1,000 miseries. So she was really not approving of my relative job hopping, which is very normal to current generations. But it was not so common in Italy when I started working. I come from the creative industry in Italy, where I worked in automotive design in advertising, in publishing and where I actually had the opportunity to share with you the experience in Milan at Flash Art International in the 1990s. Then I've been for 10 years with Philips design, with the strategic design department, created by Eric Quint, who has been Chief Design Officer of 3M. And he recently published a book about design leadership under the leadership of Stephen Marzano in the 2000s. And then I build a portfolio of academic commitments as you described. I really love teaching, I really love students, in terms of intellectual mentoring of pastoral education, I'm very passionate about anything that has to do with education, but I also do business consulting, and I try as much as possible to keep myself in the fine arts and related words with commitments, in terms of advisory board or other sorts of service to cultural foundations and institutions.
Bisi Williams 6:55
So I love how you have that comprehensive view of business, of academia, of culture, which really gives you a holistic point of view, and I'll forgive you, I'm not a designer by formal training either. But I like to think that everyone is a designer, if you have a vision, and you want to shoot for the stars that you can systematically get there and that's the methodology. So I'm really excited to jump into the fray with you here. Now we can move into the future. I'd love for you to share with our listeners your vision for health and wellness in the year 2049.
Marco Bevolo 7:33
Well, in the year 2049, it will be for sure, a completely different context. If you want to see a glimpse of what health care and wellbeing will be in 2049, you should take into consideration that we already see the senior citizens and the middle aged citizens of that time and they are the millennials. So basically, just like baby boomers and Generation X to which I belong, developed in their own path of values, beliefs, so, it will be the case for the new generations and for the millennials. I think what we will see in terms of demand, it will be more and more an evolution from the definition of sick care of addressing symptoms of measuring by output, number of events with a medical machine or number of patients to value-based care, where actually the measurement is based on how efficient and effective the treatment is. There will also be plenty of technological change. If you think about medicine at the time of Rembrandt, when the sort of military medicine was invented, in terms of being present in the field of combat. If you think about the evolution of how we regard all sorts of emotional mental conditions that were considered sickness 100 years ago and now they are completely redefined by new epistemological philosophical definitions. There you'll see the possibility for health care to really change its face. And while that's a little bit of the school in terms of futures that I have experienced, which I believe will happen by the crossing of the technological roadmaps, possibilities that come from science and from digital technologies, values and evolving social cultural values in context. And, of course, I don't like to speak about business models in the case of care because I'm a very strong believer in universal health care.
Bisi Williams 10:38
I think that the vision that you have for the future in 2049 is quite amazing, I'd like you to actually just take me back to 2049 with a progression or a digression of things and events that can happen in our life that will get us to this terrific state that you're talking about.
Marco Bevolo 10:58
Well, thinking by means of roadmapping is relatively easy. We do know that there will be stages and there will be different events happening. So it's actually quite accepted that in 2049 singularity will happen. So machines will think and will behave in a way like the human mind does. We should always accept the technological advancements and the scientific possibilities that are derived from these kinds of roadmaps of possibilities that are extrapolated almost by reflection. I think that technology will be definitely, it's almost impossible not to mention a driver of the future health care, from the digital tweaks that will offer possibilities to treat the heart, for example, to treat cardiac conditions to simulate whatever sort of invasive intervention to all sorts of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and so forth. So if you look at nuclear medicine, if you look at the advancement with robotics, that's a whole world that goes from telehealth to wearables for monitoring to very specific machinery. But I have to confess I don't see that side of the equation as really fundamental. I see more the human factor in terms of social cultural values, in terms of evolution of beliefs, and the evolution of mindsets. For example, I see that it's becoming more and more common for millennials to bring mindfulness into the picture. And I think that mindfulness, we have seen together with Filiberto Amati in our recent series of interviews on the future of events, mindfulness will become a very important reference, for example, in business schools like design thinking has become in the last 20 years. I can think that with mindfulness a different approach, a more holistic approach, a more wellness-based approach will be injected into the definition of what healthcare is just as an example, and at that point, all the technology that you have available, will be geared towards a different purpose towards a different set of expectations.
Bisi Williams 14:26
Tell me more about the different set of expectations. I love where this is going.
Marco Bevolo 14:31
Yeah, well, in a way, the way we perceive the world is very much geared to our systems of beliefs. And actually in a conversation I had with Bruce Mau, a few months ago, we were discussing how the kind of cosmology of First Nations of American natives really offer a completely different opportunity to evaluate the meaning of our presence in the world, the function of humans on the planet, and the necessity to keep a totally different, balance with the environment we have around. This is just an example to show it's not necessarily that we live by Western values. We can consider alternative ideologies, alternative epistemologies to give the interpretation, to what actually wellness is, to what your condition is, whether it's a good condition, or it's a sicker condition and what the solutions are. Of course, a science is a science, I have conditions that require medications and medications are chemicals. That is very much objective. What is way less objective is the system that defines me as a person with a condition. What are the roots of this condition, what are the remedies, and what can restore balance between me as an individual and the world outside? I don't want to sound mystical, but I think this is going to be quite fundamental in determining the choices we make about the systems that deliver health care. We have seen very big changes around the notion of what is being considered sick, or being considered healthy and this is depending on philosophy from ideology. I'm a very strong supporter of the idea of universal health care. And in that sense, also, in my conversation with my friend, Chris Bevolo, he interviewed me for his book about health care in 2030, I came across as a bit of a socialist at times for American standards, but it's not about being a socialist, it's about seeing where the maximum benefit is over the longest time. Universal health care guarantees the best individual happiness, which is fine. But it also guarantees the best social stability and the best prevention, the best functioning of society around the notion of treating people in need. I think you'll see the example of COVID vaccination. It is no point to distribute the vaccine to advance the economies of so-called advanced economies, and leave a couple of continents behind because then the virus will continue to circulate, you really need to address it and to think at a planetary level. And that's what I find really important at this stage to think about health wellbeing beyond the fact that if I am a billionaire, I have access, I can buy myself an MRI unit, and I have it in my basement in case I need it. We should really go beyond that and think about the collective condition and general wellbeing.
Bisi Williams 19:11
I think that's interesting, where you're going with this around the philosophy of health. You talk about health as a cultural concept and could you define that a little bit in terms of how you see the evolution of health in 2049, and then wrap that around what we discussed as a major redefinition of what design is and what is the ambition of design, in terms of how we can look at impact to change or make better systems in the year 2049 as you describe them in your vision.
Marco Bevolo 19:53
Well, first of all the year 2049 is really ambitious for a forecast because normally the forecast is five to 25 years. So you're really stretching to the limits of where foresight can effectively deliver scenarios. In terms of health care, I think that the notion of health care will be value-based and focused on the actual treatment and anticipation. It's very important to think in terms of cycles that are not the cycle of symptom, treatment, betterment or a cure, and going back home, but the overall wellbeing with an increasing awareness on food quality for impact. If you think about the possibility of having digital technologies to actually deconstruct what we normally used to have as a concentration, it will have a huge impact on the distribution and availability of health care. You can think about smart hospitals, walk-in clinics in rural areas, in areas previously underserved. You can think about virtual reality and artificial intelligence adopted for remote surgery. You can think about millennials growing up and eventually parents becoming grandparents, and not giving up the fundamental values. So that perhaps resembles the hippie mentality of the 1970s. The digital natives are really nomadic and if you look at the demographics, it will also be a very split health care because we will have countries which are the current advanced economies, so we are talking about North America, Japan and Western Europe. In these countries, you will have health care that will address more and more and it's already the case for senior citizens, but you will also have regions like India and Africa, that will be actually booming with a younger population. And there you have a totally different set of needs. So demographics, we probably split the notion of what health care is. But ultimately, I also think that health care itself, if you look at it from a cultural perspective, does not necessarily belong in 2049 to the same black box where we put it in the last 100 years. I'm thinking really about the evolution that psychology endured in the last 100 years. So I'm thinking about the way mental health is being redefined and the possibility will be there to anticipate much more to prevent, to invest in quality of life. The real divide is the fundamental choices that people will make at a political level, because the way health care is administered is very much depending on the sort of organizational model that is used for the delivery and for the provision and for the definition. I wonder if business parameters are really needed to apply to health care and I wonder about a yearly checkup or in the year 2049, the investment in a digital twin, in genetics, in prevention. Isn't it better than running a benchmark on how a symptom-based sick care business unit is managed? So that's the change that I envision in terms of systems. I think it will be necessary for millennials, as they grow, to rethink the system they have around and incorporate mindfulness, sustainability and all sorts of different values into those systems by means of politics in the end and redefine as such the meaning of health care and the meaning of wellbeing.
Bisi Williams 25:33
That's fascinating, I have a question for you because I want to know, why are you confident that this idea, this vision that you have can be achieved within 30 years, looking at politics, or how do you think that's going to happen to have that high touch wonderful experience that you described?
Marco Bevolo 25:52
Well, you mentioned design and I'm a big believer in design as a force that changes the world. Design thinking is very much pervasive these days, it's everywhere, I think that will be an agent, to redefine and to address the possibilities that will come from the new technologies. So I see in this connection of design thinking and design, to rethink, through design, our relationship with the world. I see a fundamental aging that will be increasingly capable of valorizing technological opportunities. I also see the new generations, perhaps, I meet a lot of students in their early 20s and I have the impression that they are more and more politically-oriented, but through a new definition of politics. I see a lot of engagement for collective wellbeing, a sense of the need to redefine, rebalance society towards a more just and more fair distribution of wealth, distribution of power. I'm a bit sometimes skeptical on some manifestations, but the fundamental direction I see is a positive direction with the current movements, inspiring and inspired by the youth to achieve massive change, because that's what they ultimately demand.
Bisi Williams 28:04
I'm also hopeful too, and I love that while you look at the world with straight eyes, you can also see a bit of optimism here and I wonder from these ideas that you describe and your bullishness on the youth and design as a driver for change for all these complex problems, how do you think the scenario that you're painting will make the world a better place?
Marco Bevolo 28:28
It's a preferable scenario. I published the book in 2009 and it was reviewed by a guy who is teaching innovation here in the Netherlands. He was quite critical because it was not an academic book. And he wrote, Mr. Bevolo was not a doctor, yet, Mr. Bevolo is a zealot. This is a book for zealots, Mr. Bevolo seems to be one of them. And at the time, I was not happy. I only got one review, and it was not very appreciative. But my students loved it and I'm still quite proud that I wrote it. So the thing is that the kind of scenario that I described, it's really looking at a form of health care that changes into anticipatory holistic, seamless care and really leverages these values for the redefinition of our place in the world according to sustainability. Of course, you can also sketch doom scenarios. You can think of a future where you'll have leaders who think about exploiting forest areas and building new highways. You can think of all sorts of doom scenarios, which is possible.
Bisi Williams 30:19
But that's somebody else's show, that's not our show.
Marco Bevolo 30:22
Yeah. But I like to point that out, too, because it's a choice and that's also what I try to always tell students, because students in general, their first intuition is that a designer is somebody who makes beautiful clothes or beautiful objects. And I try to explain to them, and following Vilem Flusser and Tony Frey, that the designer is actually the lady or the guy who makes everything in the material world around us. So fundamentally, a designer has the choice to design the most beautiful package for the most toxic product, to design the most elegant weapon that is going to kill 1000s of people, and that's why it's the best weapon, or to make a positive impact and to really pursue change. What I have seen is really an increasing ability of younger generations, not to pick the older ideological systems, but to grasp or synthesize the essence of our challenges. If you have a weather crisis you cannot think in individualistic terms when there is a storm that destroys half of the city in that sense. Perhaps I'm not generally considered an optimistic person. But I am quite optimistic about these new generations, younger generations, because I see a lot of drive to change inspired by the necessity of the environment. I'm very nostalgic of the 1960s, but that's related to my age and my sense of aesthetics. I think that anchor will be part of a revolution that will not use weapons, but will use ideas, will use a vision, and will use design to really make a difference, and to really redefine who we are and what we do on this planet.
Bisi Williams 33:15
That's beautiful. I want a future that has art, science, technology, and beauty. And I love how you equate all of those things and look at our future, which actually allows society to work at their highest purpose in a way of thriving and beauty. I enjoyed our conversation. I appreciate you sharing your bold vision and it's been an absolute honor speaking with you today. Thank you for coming on our show.
Marco Bevolo 33:56
Well, I am delighted and we can do this again. anytime soon. I'm very thrilled to contribute to the conversation and sure that there will be opportunities to inspire each other in the future. Thank you very much.
Bisi Williams 34:17
100% come back anytime. So that was Dr. Marco Bevolo sharing his vision for health and wellness in the year 2049. If you enjoyed our show, please rate, review and tell one friend about us. Thank you for listening. I'm your host Bisi Williams, take care and be well.
