Miiri Kotche is a Clinical Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently serves as Director of the Medical Accelerator for Devices Laboratory (MAD Lab) at the UIC Innovation Center. Prior to joining the faculty at UIC, she worked in new product development for medical devices, telecommunications and consumer products. She co-teaches both bioengineering capstone design courses, including the longstanding core senior design sequence and the recently launched interdisciplinary medical product development course. With her husband, Bruce, Stephanie presently runs Materious, a design studio that produces discursive and speculative products. They are currently working on a book, Design as Discourse, which seeks to further legitimize and problematize alternate forms of design practice that extend designers' cultural agency.
Interdisciplinary Medical Product DevelopmentSenior Capstone Design ABSTRACT Interdisciplinary Medical Product Development (IMPD) is a two-semester capstone senior design course involving students and faculty from multiple disciplines -Bioengineering, Industrial Design, Marketing, Graphic Design, and Medicine. IMPD focuses on applying a usercentered approach to the design of medical devices for the health care sector, and has the following student goals: be able to effectively work on interdisciplinary teams and better understand how other disciplines work and think, develop processes and framework to progress from abstract, high-level problem statements to specific, concrete design prototypes, and learn to effectively communicate to client-partners through oral presentations and written documentation.While team-based product design is part of the curriculum, formal and sustained interaction with end users to inform the design process is an integral of the Interdisciplinary Product Development capstone courses. The department of Bioengineering is jointly within both the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine, which facilitates student exposure to a wide variety of clinical environments with medical faculty engagement. The course is sponsored by an industry partner, who, in conjunction with faculty, provides project statements that are of strategic business interest. For this reason, all students participate under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The first semester focuses on early front-end development, including framing the problem, human-centered design research methods in a clinical environment, and ideation. The second semester focuses on development of design criteria, concept refinement, receiving evaluative feedback from the various stakeholders (clinicians, client, end-users), and prototyping.The IMPD course challenges students to understand the "fuzzy front end" of design, verify they are developing solutions that will satisfy an unmet need, and experience the iterative nature of engineering design. This opportunity to work on a "real-world" problem in an interdisciplinary team presents challenges that include both logistic and pedagogi...
