Rachel Hinman's post on their research reads like a textbook approach to requirements gathering phase, including 2-3 hour interviews, some in-home ethnographies, some in-person interviews with a total of ten people (a combination of type 1 and 2 diabetics and two diabetes educators). I didn't know much about diabetes before I started reading their reports, other than that diabetics have to monitor their insulin levels, usually by pricking their finger with a test device or by using a test strip, and have to add insulin to their bodies to compensate and be able to digest carbohydrates. I had no idea, for example, that most type 1 diabetics come in contact with a needle 10 - 14 times a day (between testing themselves and injecting insulin). I had also never heard of an Insulin Pump, which is an external device, connected to the body via tubing and a cannula implanted subcutaneously (under the skin). Although most of the pumps currently available are big, bulky, and really great examples of industrial design gone bad, their users love them for the control they bring and the positive impact they have on managing their condition. After building an understanding of the day-to-day realities of living with diabetes, and of the current approaches to controlling and managing insulin, the team moved into the design phase (as documented in Dan's post Charmr: Creating Concepts).

The romantic notion of design and designers is that they sit down at a blank white sheet, sketch and draw and create, some magic happens, and a beautiful design is born. Although that's fairly close to the truth, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is actually the blank white sheet itself. Unconstrained design spaces — spaces which have no limits in any direction — are difficult for the mind to grapple with. Questions like Should we make it 100 feet tall? Bright purple? Does it need to fly or swim or make flawless espresso? can destroy your forward motion and lead to designus procastinus: the incredible ability to return phone calls and emails and catch up on mundane tasks in lieu of producing a design. Blank sheets are scary, which is why we always try to go into the design phase with some hard constraints in place. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the more our design space is shaped by the reality of our clients' requirements, the easier it is for us to do our jobs. The design crew at Adaptive started out by extracting six principles from their research:

1. Users had to be able to wear it during sex (elegant, discrete, comfortable)
2. The device had to make better use of data
3. Easy to learn/teach. No numbers (diabetes affects a wide range of people so it has to be simple and downplay numbers in favour of smarter information like status and trending)
4. Less stuff (physically speaking)
5. Keep diabetics in control (no automatic pumps — give people the ability to control what's going into their bodies)
6. Keep diabetics motivated (you never get a day off from your diabetes, so try to have the device keep people motivated to control their condition)

Alexa Andrzejewski takes over from there, describing how her and Dan took that inspiration through design of the user experience, in a post called Charmr: Interaction and Visual Design. Although I lack the understanding to assess how well their concept would work for a diabetic, it looks like they've done a great job of satisfying their six principles (with a possible exception of the first one: I'm not sure how the rubber patch over the pump would live up to being worn during sex from a comfort perspective). There's an Experience Blueprint PDF available (4mb) which sums up the project as a whole, including photos and interface mockups. I think their video speaks does a great job of showing off their design:

Amy was very impressed with the results (see NEWS FLASH: SF Design Firm Unveils the Diabetes "Charmr") and the reaction has been pretty much positive across the board. The point of the exercise wasn't really to create a product specification, so much as it was to lead the manufacturers of devices toward a more user-friendly approach to product design. The Charmr has some critics, particularly ones who have wondered why Adaptive Path didn't apply themselves to solving the problem now rather than in a few years, to which Dan has responded that they felt they would have the most impact leading future products rather than fixing current ones (and I whole-heartedly agree). Our industry has a long history of using our skills to help solve bigger problems, including recent examples like the searches for Jim Gray and Steve Fossett, and more local initiatives like OpenTransit, Zerofootprint, and StartupWeekendToronto's LobbyThem. It's inspiring to see firms use their spare cycles for the power of good, and I encourage firms everywhere to do the same. And yes, before you ask, we're eating our own dog food here too and have a project underway with Zerofootprint which we can't talk about just yet. Stay tuned for more details!