Becker's Hospital Review

83 FINANCE CMO / CARE DELIVERY If you're going to talk about patient-centered care, you ought to know about Patricia Moore By Molly Gamble P atricia Moore had worked for famous product designer Raymond Loewy for three years, but one planning meeting about a refrigerator would change the course of her career. At 26, Ms. Moore was the youngest and only female industrial designer in Loewy's New York City office. During this planning meeting, she suggested the fridge door be de- signed so someone with arthritis could open it with ease. e idea was swily rejected by her superior with a stunning retort: "Pattie, we don't design for those people." e comment stung Ms. Moore, who was raised with her grandparents. "I never saw my grandparents as those peo- ple, but I witnessed their inability as they aged in place and could no longer do the simple tasks of everyday living. I knew they weren't broken; the products that confined them and confounded them were the issue," she said in an April 2019 talk at the Colum- bus College of Art & Design in Ohio. She still remembers the day her grandmother could no longer open the refrigerator door; it was the last time she cooked a meal. She would die one year later. If she couldn't design for those people, Ms. Moore decided to live as one of them. e 26-year-old soon aer began her life as an 85-year-old woman, episodically, for three years. With the help of a professional makeup art- ist, clouded contact lenses, gray permed hair, and full-body prosthetics to stiffen and slow her body movement, Ms. Moore set out in 1979 to experience ordinary moments in a youth-oriented society. is was not merely a costume, but a wholly immersive and em- pathic experience with features that altered her physical abilities. She visited airports, supermarkets, parks and neighborhoods across 116 cities. Her research was in response to what she en- countered at Raymond Loewy and named "Darwinian design," in which products are made for the white urban professional with 2.3 children, a dog and a white picket fence in mind, as she described it to the Chicago Tribune in 1985. "e fundamental thing every architect, de- signer and engineer needs to realize is that we remain very much the same person, the same consumer, for every day of our adult lives," she told Metropolis Magazine in 2012. "e activities and environments you en- joyed in your youth will remain the things you desire and rely on until your final breath. It is only when we can no longer manage the places and products we experience, not be- cause of age, but rather because of changes in our level of mental and physical ability, that the quality of our life is in jeopardy." With this thinking, Ms. Moore grew con- cerned about mismatches between design and ability, such as bottle caps and arthritic fingers, coffee mugs and weak wrists, pre- scription labels and cataracts. But her first and perhaps most profound observation was her invisibility when costumed as an elderly woman. Ms. Moore first lived as an elder in Colum- bus, Ohio, at a conference about design for skilled nursing care. She was ignored un- til the second day, when a young man said, "Yesterday there was an old lady here, why don't we talk to her?" Physical obstacles were aplenty, but just as impressionable were the prejudices and social stigmas she encountered. Cashiers would short-change her, assuming she didn't notice. Hordes of people would race by her in airports, nearly knocking her down, or cut in front of her in line. "People would see me and call out cruel things, tell me to, 'Get out of the way, you old bag.' She could not cross the street in the time permitted before the traffic light changed. Ms. Moore also endured extreme trauma during her time as an elder. She was mugged twice. e second time she was beaten by a gang, which resulted in pelvic injuries that, as she learned years later, would prevent her from having a child. Ms. Moore's experience and field notes went on to inspire international product design and the concept of universal design, in which products embrace the needs of all consumers with principles of accessibility, inclusivity, empathy and autonomy. Aer retiring "the other Pat Moore" in 1982, she started her own design firm. "I've been going into boardrooms and talking about universal design until I am blue in the face," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. For 38 years she has served as president of MooreDesign Associates. In 2019, she received the distin- guished Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in the Design Mind category. You are likely familiar with some of the de- sign concepts that Ms. Moore — nicknamed the "Mother of Empathy" — has inspired or created, including OXO Good Grips prod- ucts and more than 300 physical medicine and rehab environments for healthcare fa- cilities around the world. (Her healthcare clients include Oakland, Calif.-based Kai- ser Permanente, Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter Healthcare and New Brunswick, N.J.-based Johnson & Johnson.) She designed a mammogram with a func- tion that automatically releases the ma- chine's compression once the X-ray is complete — ending a woman's discomfort swily and not continuing it for one second longer than necessary. "at's one of my proudest moments, fighting against — sadly — the men who were financing this project and who said we didn't need to spend mon- ey on that detail," she said. Who in your organization is asking the kind of questions that Ms. Moore posed back in the 1970s as the youngest and only wom- an in a room full of "old salts," as she called them, who decided on features that deter- mined who could and couldn't participate in ordinary life? ese questions aren't limited to any specific appliance or design; they're open-ended questions that aim to start a more inclusive conversation, starting with "what if " or "what about." "I would meekly raise my hand to add, 'Well what if ?' What if, what if, what if," Ms. Moore recalled at CCAD. "It was always about what if we expanded our design vision and includ- ed people who were not considered primary consumers, primary customers. ey typi- cally were our elders, people with arthritis, people who walked with wheels, saw with their fingertips, listened with their eyes." n

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