How Design Helps Us Fight Infection Q&A with Michael Murphy and Chris Scovel

摘要

How can design fight for infection control? It's a question that architects and design professionals have been asking themselves this year as COVID-19 began a rapid global spread. Suddenly, creating optimal spaces to treat this emerging and still-mysterious illness became the most urgent design problem to solve. For the international nonprofit MASS Design Group, which has applied design thinking to health care centers in places such as Rwanda, Haiti, and Liberia since 2008, the pandemic provided a unique challenge-and a unique opportunity for innovation. Through MASS Design Group's COVID-19 Response Team, which was rapidly assembled in March to combat the growing number of cases in the Boston area and across the United States, MASS was able to compile guidelines for safer health care facilities during the pandemic-both in ad hoc tent facilities thrown together in a matter of days and repurposed spaces in existing hospitals.