When I was a teenager my baby brother was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. At this point me and my siblings had more science education than our parents, and had no medics in our family or social circles to turn to. In the years that followed, we became intimately familiar with challenge of navigating complex healthcare and research without a medical background. The crucible of these experiences sparked a passion for sharing medicine visually which has driven me ever since. I have been fortunate enough to explore the use of comics in medicine for almost a decade, and this is currently culminating in a body of research towards a Medical Doctorate with the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand. In this talk I will share some of the things I've learned along this journey so far.

At BioRender, product designers play a key role in ensuring we build products that scientists love and can’t live without. In this talk, Polly Zhang (Product Manager at BioRender) will discuss the product development process at BioRender, using real examples from recently released features. She’ll dive deep into the role of the product/interaction designer and how they work with developers and others in the company to create delightful user experiences.

Cancer care in Ontario needs to be reconsidered to meet the increasing demand, stagnant resources, and an increasing expectation from patients for good service. The pandemic opened the door for new ways of thinking about care delivery; we now have a brief opportunity to help mould the next iteration of change, and hopefully build on the momentum towards more fluid, agile, and human-centred health service innovation. Smart Cancer Care is working to bring a new approach to how we create new services for cancer care at a large, traditionally slow, risk-averse, publicly funded hospital.

There has been a significant rise in studies using Virtual reality (VR) technology with older adults (specifically as valuable tools in dementia-related research, assessment, and care). Despite increasing demand from researchers, clinicians, caregivers, and patients, VR-manufacturers continue to leave behind this key demographic, designing hardware and software with entirely different priorities. The pandemic has taught us that seniors were the most isolated group, with low digital-literacy skills that gravely impacted their physical and mental health. Let’s talk about some research methods and design principles that can keep this growing stakeholder group engaged in the real world and our virtual future.

At the intersection of health, science and strategy, there exists ‘wicked strategy problems’ – problems that are unprecedented, complex, live in an ever changing environment, and involve multiple stakeholders with different priorities. There’s no right answer to solving a wicked strategy problem. At Coactuate, I lean into my design, creativity and communication chops to tackle problems I never even thought I would face. In this talk, I'd like to share some stories of wicked problems that our healthcare clients encounter and how we approach managing them together.

I recently created a short animation about genetics and I'll share a story about my research process and how it informed the scientific visualization. The experience has caused me to reflect on access to information in general and primary literature specifically. I'll discuss when and why we care about scientific data, what limitations our current systems have, and how we can advocate for change.