Sean Hobson, Assistant Vice President & Chief Design Officer for Ed Plus, Arizona State University
How can we use design to adapt ideas from an online education model into health care? Sean Hobson, Assistant Vice President and Chief Design Officer for Ed Plus at Arizona State University, explores ways to implement solutions toward a personalized healthcare system focused on health outcomes.
Sean Hobson is the Assistant Vice President and Chief Design Officer for Ed Plus at Arizona State University, where he leads strategic design initiatives to solve complex challenges in higher education. As ASU’s first Chief Design Officer, Sean believes design is at the core of driving meaningful innovation. He has directed some of ASU’s most impactful course redesign efforts, garnering recognition in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Scientific American.
Show Notes
Sean Hobson shares an optimistic vision for healthcare in the future. [02:30]
How can we create transparency in health care? [04:32]
What are the parallels between the healthcare system and education? [06:19]
ASU’s commitment to online learning. [07:19]
Is online learning just as effective as the other programs? [08:17]
How did ASU scale online learning? [10:12]
The mother or caregiver at the center of healthcare design. [11:24]
How can we empower people to shape the technology that determines our future? [13:38]
Innovative technologies are developed to solve problems, yet they sometimes create new ones. [15:13]
What is a personalized happiness plan? [16:47]
How do you measure the success of a personalized happiness plan? [18:07]
What does this digital tool look like? [19:34]
What should we not be pursuing in terms of health and education? [22:32]
Transcript
Bisi Williams: I'm Bisi Williams, you're listening to health 2049.
Sean Hobson: I think in an ideal world, it would fit into the flow of my life rather than having us make adjustments to even figure out, let alone adapt to what the system is providing.
Bisi Williams: [01:34] Imagine what access to higher education and by extension health and wellbeing could look like by designing the tensions between broad accessibility and academic success. Our guest today is charged with doing exactly that. Meet Sean Hobson, Assistant Vice President and Chief Design Officer for Ed Plus at Arizona State University, where he leads strategic design initiatives to solve complex challenges in higher education. As ASU’s first chief design officer Sean believes design is at the core of driving meaningful innovation. This week, we challenged Sean to think creatively about the state of health and wellbeing in 2049. Welcome to health 2049, Sean.
Sean Hobson: [02:20] Thank you Bisi. It's my pleasure to be here.
Bisi Williams: [02:23] We're happy to have you. So what changes will there be within how healthcare is delivered and received in the future?
Sean Hobson: [02:31] It's such an interesting question and to be honest, one that I've been laboring on a little bit, since we talked about having this discussion. There's an optimistic future, but then I think there's some challenges. You have big, very comfortable systems and cultures and disrupting those are very challenging. But I think, it's perhaps quite basic and getting back to first principles. When I think about what first principles are, I think about a much more personalized model. And so as with education, when I think about personalized, I think about providing the right tear for the right individual, at the right time.
So while that might seem like a basic principle in a first statement, you wouldn't have to look far to see contradictions towards that. It's a very patient-centered model in one where the interventions are as simple, transparent, and hopefully invisible to the patient, because I think the outcomes for the patient, it's not going to the doctor, it's not getting this type of care, they are most likely life outcomes. Things like happiness, feeling healthy, being productive, living longer, performing better. Those are the outcomes of healthcare, at least in my perhaps naive estimation. So making some of the care transparent in the process I think would be a tremendous, type of evolution.
Bisi Williams: [04:28] So tell me, how you would make the care transparent?
Sean Hobson: [04:32] A transparent experience for my nine-year-old daughter is different for me than it is for my parents. It’s hard not to think about the experience that all three of us have gone through in trying to understand COVID–understand the risks, understand and get access to the appropriate care and the logistics around all of those things including what we're dealing with around getting access to the vaccine. We each have different experiences in that process and the process is anything but transparent.
I think in an ideal world, it would fit into the flow of my life rather than having us make adjustments to even figure out, let alone adapt to what the system is providing. And so I think it all starts for me around education, helping people understand complex topics, the more connected we are, the more messages we get, the more confusing it all becomes. And I think when you have a state of confusion and there's this feeling that you get around being vulnerable, being unprepared not knowing what to do. I think that's a big part of it. One thing that's attracted me to education is that, and healthcare for that matter I think has a similar type of position, that most problems have education at the core in terms of thinking about solutions.
Bisi Williams: [06:19] I love that. What are the parallels between healthcare and education in your opinion, Sean?
Sean Hobson: [06:26] I think there are many. When you think about healthcare and education as systems, they have many of the same actors and then they have many of the same bureaucracies and challenges. There's localized challenges, there's national challenges, there's different stakeholders, but when I think about the similarities, it's also this notion that there's a service framework, whether it be the patient or the student, they are ultimately who should be at the center of the design.
Bisi Williams: [07:09] I think that's interesting, Sean. One of the things I’d like for you to paint a picture, tell us how you revolutionized higher learning online with your work at ASU.
Sean Hobson: [07:19] Sure, happy to. Everything that we do with respect to online and digital education works backwards from our charter. In essence, it’s that ASU aspires to be measured by who we include and not by who we exclude, reaching learners where they are and finding a way to serve learners who otherwise might not be able to participate in a traditional residential model. And so we've been working through Ed Plus and through ASU online for the last 15 years or so in earnest to design solutions in service of those learners.
Bisi Williams: [07:59] I'd like you to just tell us a little bit more. I mean, when you started 15 years ago, online learning wasn't really a thing and it was an afterthought. Tell us what is the difference or what is the Arizona State University difference and what directly did you do to make online learning more effective?
Sean Hobson: [08:17] I think the biggest difference is that there's no difference at all, if that makes sense. And so online is just a different modality for us. We believe that the outcomes and the quality are exactly the same. We use our same faculty that teach our residential experience. We deploy latest tools and instructional design theories and pedagogies. And so part of what we set out to do is really work on the culture of the institution.
For each professor that goes through the experience of designing an online course and going through that change process that occurs when you go from teaching a lecture model to an online course and working backwards from the needs of an online student, then there’s change that happens. When you do that over and over again, you start to really affect the culture of the institution. And once our faculty began to really adopt the model and believe in what's possible and see it not as a different methodology and in quality, but as a simply a different modality, then anything is possible. And so once we establish that culture early on, that's what has led to our ability to scale and succeed.
Bisi Williams: [09:49] I love that you built the culture. When you had the mandate to build online learning 15 years ago, you did so with design and intention, you needed to go and find the people, first of all, who weren't knocking on your door and then you needed to invite them and inform them that there's a whole world waiting for them. And you're just scaling. I mean, you started with how many students and how many students do you have today?
Sean Hobson: [10:12] We started with about 400 students in four degree programs. This year we'll serve somewhere in the order of 70,000 students across 200 or so degree programs and certificates. And just to clarify, these are ASU online students and so these are students that will start and finish their entire degree without coming to campus except for graduation. That's been tremendous growth, 20% year over year.
Bisi Williams: [10:48] So when you think about that model and you think about 20% growth year over year, and you translate that to healthcare, first of all, you changed the culture, you made sure that your online wasn't less than, it was equal to. Can you imagine the interface of healthcare delivery, trusted networks, learning for general citizens to figure out how to get the care that they need when they need it and how they need it is. Do you think that's translatable and scalable to have a fantastic digital medical experience given the tools we have?
Sean Hobson: [11:24] It's a great question. Even though we've achieved some success there, it’s nowhere close to what we need in terms of scale. And I think you have that same type of challenge with healthcare. If you look at the complexity and the size of the problem, even our open access model, our online model is still not available to everybody. And so we have a very great model for a subset of the population, but we need to be also building models that scale in the millions and the tens of millions. And I think healthcare has that same type of challenge.
In some cases, when you look at the coronavirus, for example, the urgency is even more prevalent. And so when a platform like YouTube, for example, has more than 2 billion users a month and 90% of them are there to learn something, that’s the type of scaled platform that we need to be developing solutions with and for. And health care needs some of those same things.
One thing I was thinking about and where might scaled healthcare be happening right now, it occurred to me that the biggest provider of healthcare isn't the doctor or the nurse or the surgeon. It's what happens in the home. So it's the mother, it's the caregiver. And this is around the world, so I haven't seen too many solutions that put the mother at the center of healthcare design.
Bisi Williams: [13:13] I love that. So here's a question and let's think about the mother at the center of care. As technical developments increasingly drive social change, how can democratic societies empower ordinary people, or in this case, parents, mothers, and fathers, to have a say in the decisions that shape the technological pathways that will in turn determine what the future looks like?
Sean Hobson: [13:38] We are in a very interesting and amazing time with respect to advancements in technology. I think we're also in an amazing time with respect to agency. So any individual can have a voice and can have a pathway to making something incredible. Education, again, is at the center of that.
I think too often technology solutions are developed in a bit of a Silicon Valley vacuum or Ivy league vacuum. I think we do need to get more diversity in the design process. And I think when you start to do that in the democratic process you outlined, I think you get more inclusive solutions that may not have some of the profit motivations that we see in some of our scaled technology platforms, but social ones. I’s going to be an increasing set of urgencies around how new technology companies are created and funded that they have a social impact agenda at the core of their of their mission.
Bisi Williams: [14:56] You know, Sean, I think that's interesting, too. I have another question for you along those lines in that, a while ago, you'd mentioned that sometimes while the innovations and technologies are a boon to a few, sometimes the problems that we mean to solve, create other ones.
Sean Hobson: [15:13] Yeah. I think we often look to technology to solve problems. In many respects it can, but it also can leave a lot of people out. You know, when I think about the signup process to get my parents signed up to take a COVID vaccine, that little innovation on one hand that provides anybody in the state of Arizona a web form and openings and places to go and general information, is also perhaps leaving out some of its most urgent users, those who may not have the technical literacy or the access to a computer to sign up. That's an example of a conflict in the design process.
I'm kind of trained this way to work backwards, to approach some of these big challenges from backwards to design. And so I find myself wanting to ask what this kind of desired state in 2049 is, and both from a process standpoint in terms of what these interventions look like, but also, what is the desired outcome for the patient?
Bisi Williams: [16:44] I love that. Can you expand on that more?
Sean Hobson: [16:47] Sure, and so everybody’s going to have their unique definition here, but for me, the holy grail is happiness. For some, it might be longevity, but if you live to be 120, but you're miserable, what’s the point? I think the way to get there is to have a personalized healthcare plan or a personalized happiness plan. I can assemble that and I can tweak it and I can build it myself because I’ve developed the skills to do that.
Bisi Williams: [17:24] So tell me about your personalized happy plan.
Sean Hobson: [17:28] I think it's a thing that you check in on, whether it's every day, every week, when you think about your five-year trajectory there's a lot of things going on in the world. There's a lot of things going on in the daily life of somebody who's juggling a career, juggling all the messages, I think you've got to take stock in where you are.
Bisi Williams: [17:56] Well, I have a question. So how do you measure it? Do you write it down? Do you paint it? Do you record it? How do you actually keep your data point for your happiness on a daily, weekly, monthly?
Sean Hobson: [18:07] For me it's more of an intrinsic thing. I ask myself how am I doing? I might talk to my wife about it. I might observe how my kids are doing and notice that my happiness could be a reflection on them and how they're doing. I look at my job, my career. Am I doing work that's meaningful to me because I know that's an important trigger for my happiness. And look, this is a constant struggle, it's not that I have some sort of secret happiness algorithm here. It's just that's my long-term objective. And so I think it starts with perhaps looking internally about what those objectives are and then putting together designs and plans to test and achieve them.
Bisi Williams: [19:09] I love what she said about algorithms and test and achieve. And I want to take this sort of intrinsic analog notion and marry it with other tools that we have and when you talk about personalized care, so can you imagine in this future state how the public and you, so going from the micro to the macro would have meaningful input, can you imagine this as a tool?
Sean Hobson: [19:34] Well, I think we have some of those tools, but I think the user lacks agency in the process. So when I look at some of the technology platforms that we have out there now, whether it's Facebook, Google, Twitter, or others, they understand a lot about me. They understand my behaviors, they understand my likes, my interests, they understand all these things. And sure I can go into the settings and I can probably change how much of that I share. But part of me is okay with it because maybe they're showing me things that might be useful to me or exciting to me.
And so I think first understanding that is part of it. So that I know when I buy something based on a behavior on a particular platform, I know the consequences of that, and I got to be comfortable with it, but I think there has to be more of an intentional and transparent and simplified process that allows the end user to personalize it to their benefit. Not necessarily the benefit of the platform itself.
Bisi Williams: [20:49] I think that's an interesting perspective. And so understanding that the world is complex, that things are uncertain, when you think about access to information and critical thinking, how do you imagine you could imbue it at the early stage, middle stage and end stages of life? What does that look like for you?
Sean Hobson: [21:13] My thinking on this is very much inspired by Sir Ken Robinson who's an amazing educator and author. He proposes, and I believe that learning is a natural human ability. As children, we have this thirst for learning and we see it as fun and we do this in early childhood through kindergarten and others. And then for various reasons, whether it's structures we've built or individual interactions, some of us lose it and then we need to find our way back.
I think it's part of how the system is designed, but it's also part of, you could call it a care plan in terms of how you think about getting back to some of those natural instincts or tendencies that you have as a child around learning,
Bisi Williams: [22:19] I love that giving your purview as a technologist, as a teacher and a designer, what in your opinion should we not be pursuing in terms of health and education?
Sean Hobson: [22:32] I think there's a real risk in choosing and deploying technology for technology's sake. Technology isn't typically the outcome, it's the tool and the mechanism in the vehicle to support the outcome. So clarity around that I think is really important. And so I think the appropriate design development, deployment of technology, and support of inclusive and responsible outcomes is really the way to think about some of the evolution that's going to be happening.
Bisi Williams: [23:19] Thank you so much. It's good to have you, Sean.
Sean Hobson: [23:21] Thanks for having me Bisi.
Bisi Williams: [23:23] So that concludes our program today of Health2049 with Sean Hobson, Chief Design Officer for Ed Plus at Arizona State University. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe or share with a friend and until next time I'm Bisi Williams.
