Realizing the potential of FemTech – your questions answered

August 10th 2021

Jessica Platt

Martha Hodgson

In our webinar, Realizing the potential of FemTech, CDP’s Martha Hodgson and Jessica Platt gave their take on the principles of FemTech, and how forerunners are implementing them to succeed.

Here, Martha, Senior Insight & Strategy Consultant, and Jessica, Associate Insights Researcher, share more ideas, answering questions sparked by their presentation.

How important are digital security and data privacy in FemTech innovation?

Jessica: Digital security and data privacy are hugely important – so many FemTech products are linked to the internet and share information. They should be part of any design process from the start. Mishandling them can be costly. For example, a leading sex toy maker ran into trouble when their remote-controlled Bluetooth vibrator was found to be vulnerable to hackers who could take control of the product. They also shared data about the temperature of the vibrator with their parent company. As a result, they were ordered to make huge pay-outs to customers.

The Internet of Things poses challenges for internet products – how do you recommend we deal with them?

Jessica: Regulation and privacy are exciting areas because brands can become pioneers in these spaces. There’s a vast knowledge gap around women’s health, and the data FemTech collects should be used for research, but it must be done carefully. Transparency is key. Users should be empowered and told how their data will be used, stored, and shared – and not in pages of terms and conditions that most users accept without reading.

Your presentation highlighted that people have functional, social, and emotional needs – which are most important for FemTech to meet?

Martha: When you’re thinking about the importance of a need, consider the context. Also, you should know how well existing products are meeting that need. A highly important need might already be being met with a high level of satisfaction. Some exciting innovations have come from focusing on highly important needs that are being met with low levels of satisfaction – or needs of low importance that are being met with (overly) high levels of satisfaction. For example, budget airlines disrupted the travel industry by understanding that in-flight meals are of low importance to their customers on short-haul flights, so they strip them out to offer a low-price service. In FemTech, experienceis as important as the tangible product, or even more so. Therefore, think about current levels of satisfaction and explore needs being over- and under-served by existing solutions.

How can FemTech leverage existing technology?

Martha: A lot of amazing innovations are the result of transferable learnings. The answer isn’t always new technology. Sometimes, it comes from looking at a problem differently and seeing that you could reapply an existing solution to deliver a different value in a different context. So, take a step back from the technology. Understand that it’s a point-in-time solution to a problem. Then, take a solution-agnostic approach to the job you’re trying to do.

How can we deliver excitement when repurposing existing technology?

Martha: Experience is shaped by all five of our senses, so think about the sensorial experience when translating consumer needs into solutions. Also, be aware of pre-existing mental models – shaped by culture, environment, influencers and so on – and how far consumers are willing to stretch these. Take sanitary products. There are loads of new, exciting materials that are thinner, more flexible, and more absorbent than those used today. However, mental models around security and comfort might mean users won’t willingly go down these routes, even though they might provide a better solution. Excitement doesn’t just come from technology enablers but understanding the outcome as a series of sensory attributes and translating these into experiences.

There are many tech innovations around infertility, and it seems other areas are being ignored. Is this true? If so, why?

Jessica: FemTech Focus define FemTech as “Technology, services, and products that improve women, females, and girls’ health and wellness. This includes addressing challenges that solely, disproportionately, or differently affect them.” This is my starting point when thinking about FemTech, and it tells you how inclusive FemTech is – it’s not limited to fertility and menstruation, though a lot of attention has been focussed on these. There are opportunities around conditions that affect women differently. For example, heart attacks have different symptoms in women. This means women’s heart attacks are sometimes missed or treated later, resulting in worse outcomes. FemTech solutions that address heart health might help mitigate these adverse outcomes.

Why does only a small percentage of investment in digital health go to FemTech?

Jessica: FemTech is relatively new – there have only been a handful of billion-dollar exits. So, there’s still a long way to go to educate investors that FemTech is lucrative, and products and services designed to meet women’s needs aren’t niche. However, we’re on the cusp of a transformation in the way FemTech is funded.

Martha: Changing investors’ perceptions of FemTech needs us to think about how we communicate the opportunity. Industries must be able to see long-term commercial profit. The needs that FemTech addresses are stable and shared by 51% of the population – this helps explain the long-term gains that could be made through FemTech investment.

Is FemTech only about healthcare and sexual health?

Martha: Absolutely not. Take the sports industry. Women’s sport has been on a growth trajectory, and there are many examples of women-focused services and products thriving based on the ergonomics, size, and shape of women’s bodies. Women’s football-boot maker IDA Sports’ tagline is spot on: “You are not an afterthought”. Traditional category borders are blurring, which is opening exciting innovation opportunities, like FemTech. Seeing FemTech as an innovation philosophy lets you focus on the needs you can meet – rather than the sector label.

To continue the conversation, get in touch: womenshealth@cambridge-design.com

REFERENCES

What’s FemTech – FemTech Focus [Internet]. Femtechfocus.org. [cited 9 August 2021]. Available from: https://femtechfocus.org/whats-femtech/
Ida Sports Australia | We make football boots for Women [Internet]. Ida Sports. [cited 9 August 2021]. Available from: https://www.idasports.co/

Incisive action: Cutting the carbon footprint in surgery

April 22nd 2021

Kiron Athwal

Insight and Strategy Consultant

Hear us out: the pandemic has stretched world health services to their limits, but it may also be paving the way toward a greener future for healthcare.

When thinking of healthcare today, you probably picture the huge pressures on overworked healthcare staff and the scramble for hospital beds. What you may not have thought about is that hospitals in many countries have adopted innovation that inadvertently introduced ‘greener’ treatment. For example, the need to perform ‘virtual’ consultations has reduced patient travel to and from practices. In April 2020; within weeks of COVID-19 hitting the UK, 71% of all GP visits were remote, compared to 25% in April 2019.

“A single operation can have the same carbon footprint as driving 2,273 miles in an average sized gas-powered car.“

Before COVID-19, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) produced 27 million tons of CO2 equivalent annually, which accounted for 5% of all UK carbon emissions. To combat this, in October 2020 the UK government announced plans for a greener NHS: net zero carbon emissions directly from the NHS by 2040, and its supply chain by 2045.

In the context of COVID-19, this is an ambitious goal even if we were able to sustain the kind of CO2 emission drops witnessed during lockdowns. The forced shutdown of elective surgery may have reduced hospital carbon footprints, but this has been at the expense of patient care and can’t continue. Further ahead, the NHS will be caring for an increasingly ageing population, putting demands on provisions which will lead to increasing energy and resource consumption.

The operating theater has extensive electricity needs, powering equipment, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, and is three to six times more energy-intensive than the rest of the hospital. This electricity reliance coupled with anesthetic gas and the need for single-use equipment has a significant carbon footprint. Chantelle Rizan, a Fellow of the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare and currently undertaking a PhD to identify carbon hotspots in surgery, found that a single operation can have the same carbon footprint as driving 2,273 miles in an average sized gas-powered car.

So, aside from upgrading hospital buildings and moving to renewable energy supplies, the UK government must explore ways to make surgical practice more sustainable in order to hit the NHS net zero targets. This won’t be easy.

Virtual clinics have helped with triage (deciding severity and service allocation) and surgical follow-ups, but it’s difficult to plan surgery without examining the patients face-to-face. Any changes must avoid extra red tape and be economically viable for healthcare services. Advances may have trade-offs between short-term losses (retraining) and long-term gains (reducing hospital stays or complications). Most importantly of all, sterility must be maintained at all costs. Here’s a new mantra to repeat: green only if clean.

We’ve recently been exploring the challenges facing surgical providers in embracing sustainable change. In our ‘Circularity in Context’ article we considered circularity filters to ensure future products and services become carbon neutral. This philosophy of circularity, maintaining the value invested in materials and products, has applications in healthcare but may also come into conflict with other imperatives, such as sterility.

Before joining CDP I spent time working closely with orthopedic surgeons, observing procedures in the operating theater first hand, showing me where improvements could be found. Innovating in the surgical space is a complex and nuanced area, where first-hand knowledge of the sector is key. Surrounded by a team of engineers, designers, researchers, and healthcare-savvy innovators at CDP, we’ve applied the filters for circularity to identify areas in which circular approaches could provide significant advantages.

Short-term wins

There are many ways to reduce the cradle-to-grave carbon impact of surgical equipment, while engaging clinicians and being financially attractive to health service procurement. Layer upon layer of plastics and non-renewables are used in sterile packaging for implantable devices. If we can’t fully move away from these packaging conventions because of safety and transportation requirements, can we source materials from low-emission supply chains and use local production and assembly for more efficient, less carbon intensive shipping and distribution?

Delivering care with convenience and guaranteed sterility has tended to result in single-use equipment, but we are seeing signs of returning to reusable equipment which is reprocessed between uses. Reprocessing patient drapes, laparotomy pads and intravascular catheters are being used to reduce waste so long as sterility and accuracy can be maintained and improved cleaning cycles reduce energy and water usage. Reprocessing of instruments has been driven more by cost concerns rather than sustainability, but this hints at the potential economic benefits of reprocessing beyond complex instruments. This could be further bolstered if the hospital can receive reimbursement for reprocessing an instrument instead of purchasing a new one.

There will always be cases where single-use equipment is a necessity for sterility or convenience, or where a Life Cycle Analysis shows this to be the most environmentally friendly approach. We can still streamline these sets so that rarely used kit is not disposed of even when it hasn’t been used, as is often the case once a set is opened in theater.

Long-term innovation

Given the need to develop better treatments and the burden of evidence needed to establish safety and efficacy for devices and systems, the healthcare industry can perhaps be forgiven for not having led in the sustainability space. Healthcare requirements are a barrier, as materials must be well understood and de-risked for a specific healthcare scenario before they can be used, but this should not stunt long-term innovation.

One way that future technology could reduce surgical waste is by harnessing fluid-resistant materials, improving the efficacy and safety of personal protective equipment. Going further, incineration techniques could be completely transformed by advances in energy recovery processes: being able to create large amounts of heat or electricity to feed back to the hospitals efficiently and at a larger scale than currently performed.

An emerging technology that promises radical change in surgical training is extended reality – simulating virtual environments or even overlaying them with real environments to enhance the experience. Extended reality expands access to expert training while streamlining the associated hospital footfall and travel. Virtual reality headsets are allowing trainees to view, practice, and learn surgical procedures, reducing the hours needed to be spent in surgical theaters.

The advent of very low latency wireless technologies, including 5G, could allow us to push virtual care even further. Even when surgeons are in a different country and time zone to the patient altogether, mixed reality could allow expert surgeons to offer real-time assistance and robotically assisted surgery systems could enable entirely remote surgery. This reduces travel but more excitingly it widens the opportunity for patients to receive specialist care wherever they live.

Societal filters: rapid recovery and reduced complications

There’s a risk we limit our understanding of surgical carbon footprint to manufacturing, electricity usage, and disposal. But we must consider the trickier question: how can we reduce the burden of the patient on the healthcare system through improved outcomes and reduced complications? One study found that anti-reflux surgery on the NHS could, despite having a high initial financial and carbon cost, be more carbon-efficient than ongoing medical treatment by the 9th post-operative year (and cost-efficient by the 14th year).

One tool in the arsenal is less invasive procedures. These require more specialized training and increase procedure complexity, particularly during early adoption, but they can drastically reduce patient recovery times and pressure on hospital beds. Less invasive procedures can also reduce the number of rehabilitation trips required for physiotherapy and occupational therapy.

Innovations that reduce follow-ups should be pursued and anything that reduces post-surgical complications or provides more durable treatment is likely to drive better overall sustainability. For example, improving surgical wound closure systems could help reduce infection rates, one of the leading causes of hospital readmission following surgery (3% of patients die as a consequence). The medical device industry can also deploy digital health tools to improve medication compliance, to introduce disease prevention strategies and to stimulate rehabilitation, all of which will lead to better outcomes from surgery and minimize unnecessary procedures, in turn reducing the carbon footprint.

At the heart of innovation is the need to understand the user. Following my experiences with surgical professionals in the operating theater, it’s great to be part of an innovation team at CDP that actively pursues “green” solutions while being respectful of the vital work that surgeons do.

The big cover up; designing masks for a pandemic world, and living with a new normal

May 7th 2020

Ben Strutt

Over recent weeks the news has shown daily challenges faced by mask-clad shoppers waiting in long queues for basic household goods; reports of front-line healthcare workers unable to procure personal protective equipment (PPE); and huge efforts being made by businesses to ramp up or re-task production facilities to meet new demands. Now in the UK, the government is set to reverse its original advice on the use of face masks by the general public outside the home.

A recent article by the Lancet reflected that where previous research on the use of masks in non-health-care settings had predominantly focused on the protection of the wearers, there is an alternative rationale to also protect the people around users from respiratory droplets, which in the context of a virus pandemic, places weight on different operating criteria and benefits. This is also supported by recent studies in South Korea, and Hong Kong .

My colleague Richard Owen recently wrote a blog on personal ‘bio-security’, the importance of hygiene and the limitations of some types of face masks as PPE for the general public. The benefits of masks derive from a complex interplay of technical, anatomical, and even emotional and social factors contributing to their performance, use and adoption.

While a complete understanding of how Coronavirus is transmitted is still being researched by scientists across the world, basic engineering can help us understand some of the issues and choices facing the general public. The ideal solution would be a mask that forms a two-way barrier to viruses while allowing the user to breathe normally. That way you are protected from others, and others are protected from you.

Unfortunately, there are some technical challenges. Firstly the Coronavirus is very small, in the order of 100nm in size, so they can exist in droplets that hang in the air and filters have to be quite dense, or utilise complementary technologies to form a barrier to them. Whilst it is relatively easy to make filter media that meets this technical specification, avoiding unwanted leakage between the mask and the face, that short circuits the filter, becomes the main design challenge. Because everyone has face contours that are different, and masks must fit tightly to seal, those that seal well are less comfortable to wear for long periods of time. This discomfort is exacerbated by the resistance experienced by inhaling and exhaling through the barrier membrane, leading to fatigue.

Then there is the problem of condensation inside the mask caused when the wearer’s warm humid breath condenses on the cooler mask components. This adds to discomfort caused by pressure against the areas of the face where skin is close to maxillofacial sub-structure, and by skin sensitivity to the material choice in some users.

It also stands to reason that if the mask successfully catches viruses from the environment, then over a day it will effectively concentrate them in one place. So removal and disposal of the mask requires care to avoid it becoming a direct source of infection itself.

Finally, there is a good argument that increased demand for masks from the general public will mean that supplies may be diverted away from those most at risk and in most need, healthcare workers and carers treating sick patients.

As with any medical device, design is a compromise based on the likelihood and risk of different outcomes. To completely minimise risk requires a military style NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical) suit, which is obviously not a practical solution. So the mask performance is determined by the possibility of meeting enough virus to cause disease, the likelihood of the virus getting through, or more likely around, your mask, together with the usability, availability and cost of the mask that determines if you wear it in the first place. This means different designs of mask are the best compromise in different situations, but the wearer must understand the protection they have and not stray outside the environment their set up is designed for.

There is also the question of who the mask is protecting, the wearer or the people they meet? Is the virus inside or outside the mask? Many existing mask designs have small valves to let exhaled air bypass the filter to reduce condensation and breathing effort, so these don’t provide any protection from viruses escaping.

In a population where you don’t know who is infected, then public coughs and sneezes pose a high infection risk. As Richard pointed out in his blog, particles can easily travel several meters from the person who sneezes, well beyond the social distancing 2m radius. Logic suggests that even a leaky, home-made mouth cover would absorb a percentage of the sneeze or cough, and so reduce the dose acquired by others close by. In this situation the risk to the user of concentrating their virus in the mask is irrelevant as they have the virus anyway. However, sharing masks or asking others to handle or wash them poses new opportunities for infection.

So in an environment where governments and scientists are weighing up different lock-down exit strategies, even a simple, imperfect mask appears a positive measure for those who don’t know if they have the virus but want to reduce the potential of onward infection.

In addition, there is also a psychological effect to consider. In a world where many people have been indoors for weeks, emerging for the first time back into public spaces where there may be an unseen ‘enemy’, is likely to increase levels of social anxiety.

We recently spent a fortnight undertaking immersive field research in China to develop a specification for a new technology-enabled personal pollution mask. The aim of this project was to avoid the health risk associated with inhalation of pollution in busy cities, where particles, designated as PM2.5 (atmospheric particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in size) can reach into your lungs and even be absorbed into the bloodstream.

We found in addition to the practical concerns about pollution filtration, inhale/exhale experience, fit, carriage, and maintenance, even in a pre-pandemic world some wearers expressed a strong feeling of responsibility to wear a mask as a social courtesy to protect those around them from anything they may be carrying, especially in enclosed spaces such as packed rush-hour buses.

We were also struck by the tension between the reassurance of efficacy for many adult users provided by an industrial aesthetic, against masks with a more informal or fashion-oriented design language, which were perceived to reduce confidence in their functional credentials. Children reversed this insight, with use compliance being directly influenced by designs with comic or novelty value!

In the UK, like in many European countries, pre-pandemic it was incongruous to don masks in public places. However, the low cost and low burden of incorporating them into city life seems a small price to pay to reduce infection rates. Indeed, it is a habit that may well survive the current pandemic and become a new social norm.

References:
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30918-1/fulltext
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.12.20034660v1

Engineering sensory experiences

March 24th 2020

Ben Strutt

As we are exposed to new sensory experiences, we develop deep seated cognitive constructs that in turn further influence our decision-making – perhaps the illusive sixth sense!

Our perceptions of flavour and fragrance in our food and drink is one of the most hard-wired responses. Initially designed to help the human species survive and reproduce by finding things safe to consume, after the more recent industrialisation of food it has become an opportunity to engineer the parameters that influence preference, liking and consumption.

Today an entire industry has grown up around flavours and fragrances; sensory sciences came of age as a discipline to help objectively understand, parameterise, and engineer the specific attributes that impact on our choices. Sensory Panels, expert groups of individuals, carefully trained to objectively parameterise different formulations are core to the development of new product specifications; from defining our favourite toothpaste mouth tingle, to building corporate confidence in the transition to a sugar substitute in a $bn snack brand (our team have worked on both!), it is likely that a sensory expert will have been involved along the way!

But is this, in many ways standardised approach, limiting us? Are opportunities being missed to leverage this scientific rigour and usefully blend it with subjective consumer perception? How should sensory science engage with global trends, omni-channel product experiences, the circular economy, declining brand loyalty and steady growth of e-commerce?

At CDP we are working in a number of ways (two of which we’ve outlined below) to make product specifications more commercially effective, and more sensorially affective, and we had the chance to display some of our work at the Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium last year.

1. Look beyond flavour, fragrance and mouth-feel!

Online grocery shopping is growing rapidly, and yet the physical pack interaction experience has always been central to in-store decision-making. While traditional sensory sciences often bias us towards flavour and fragrance, the old proverb reminds us that the first bite is with the eye, and CDP’s team believe that other senses can be leveraged through intelligent packaging design to amplify under-utilised sensory cues. Our Front End Innovation team have developed a methodology to effectively translate formulation attributes into packaging parameters to help reinforce the anticipation of consumption at the first moment of truth. We have worked closely with the makers of some of the most famous mayonnaise and spreads brands in the world to, for example, elicit, create and reinforce positive haptic cues in the jar lid, giving confidence in the seal and re-seal experience, and to premiumize the acoustic signature of the thin-walled pack-lid on repeat opening. Even the maker of dry, powdered soups and bouillons was able to leverage packaging parameters that positioned the product closer to more desirable attributes of naturalness and freshness. Our team includes scientists and engineers, which means we can provide a rigorous quantitative technical specification for that enhanced, consumer-validated pack experience!

2. Involve the consumer!

Involve them precisely because they are not trained panellists; involve them in Sprints, and co-creation and in-home sensory research, as well as more traditional central location or lab testing! It can be extremely illuminating to involve consumers in exploratory formative research, rather than just for validation of what a sensory panel have advised or specified. Involving them early on can lead to serendipitous moments where new connections are made – leading to new value propositions, and opportunities for brand extension. It can also lead to surprising revelations that highlight some limitations of objective sensory science methods, when a consumer responds to small, almost imperceptible changes to a pack design in an unexpected way.

In many industries, the manufacturing and regulatory lead times and consumer loyalties associated with changing formulations can be far more restrictive than changing pack design; our work has demonstrated time and again that we can influence consumer perception of key formulation attributes such as efficacy, healthiness, freshness, and strength, even prior to first use, by making changes solely to the packaging look, feel, and sound.

New products and experiences are coming onstream all the time, and for some of these a sensory panel base line or ‘normal’ specification does not yet exist; we have recently been working on an entirely new category of product which demanded a new sensory protocol to be created, and which at the heart of it considered how the device and formulation had to work in harmony to create the consumption experience. We were excited to pioneer a collaboration between our team and affective methodologies, with those of a more traditional flavours and fragrance partner, and the result is an optimised, category transforming product-formulation experience.

As a sensory industry, we need to re-imagine the relationship between the formulation and the devices or packaging containing and dispensing it; it is a closer and more mutually symbiotic relationship than past practice gives credit to. Through this insight we have more opportunity than ever before to positively engineer a multi-sensorial consumer experience that truly delights.

Will Google sequence your genome for free?

March 12th 2020

Richard Owen

Bio-Scientist

Recent advances in reducing the cost of DNA sequencing are beginning to offer the possibility of healthcare services in affluent countries sequencing the full genome of all their citizens. This has the potential of delivering huge benefits in the early detection and management of many diseases and consequently will profoundly improve clinical practice. However, the necessary balance between available cash, suitable technical resources and access to personal data are acting as a significant block to the genome’s potential.

The first human genomes were sequenced by the Human Genome Project and took 13 years, cost $2.7 billion and involved 20 of the world’s leading laboratories [1]. Since then there has been spectacular improvements in the speed and cost of genome sequencing, so much so that the advances made significantly outstrip the well-known Moore’s law improvements made in the computer chip industry [2, 3]. As an example of this progress, Veritas Genetics are currently offering a whole genome sequencing service direct to the consumer for less than £500 [4]. It is highly likely that, in a few years’ time, with further advances in technology and the inevitable scaling efficiencies involved when testing at a national level that the cost per sequenced genome could drop to around £50.

At this price point, the costs involved in a nation-wide genome sequencing program do not seem unreasonable. To sequence every child born in the UK (731,000 per year or 2,000 per day) would cost £37m which is a mere 0.03% of NHS England’s 2018 budget [5, 6]. Their genome will not change over time and if sequenced at birth its information can be made use of throughout their life and hence deliver maximum benefit. Even sequencing the entire population would be equivalent to just 3% of the budget for 2018 [6]. The apparent attainability of this is reinforced when considering that the UK government spent over £300m on the 100,000 genome project and plans to turn the NHS into “the first mainstream health service in the world to offer genomic medicine as part of routine care” [7]. Access to such a phenomenal genetic resource paired with the demographic and health records held on each person by the NHS would allow academics and clinicians to fast track research and identify the sequences that allow early and corrective management of many of today’s crippling chronic diseases.

So, while the above might suggest this is an obvious project for governments to invest in, there are very good reasons why they might be hesitant to do so. Firstly, we do not know how to make use of the vast majority of the data that will be collected – we are in a position where we can read people’s genomes at a relatively low cost but struggle to understand and make full use of the information contained and this may well take many years to change. Secondly two very significant sets of infrastructures have to be established. The first is a national facility capable of sequencing 2,000 genomes a day, the second is a data storage and analysis capability that can handle the astonishing amount of data that will be created by such a system. One way to visualize the amount of data is that the 750,000 genomes collected each and every year would require a stack of standard 4 gigabyte DVDs about 1.5 miles high [8]. Indeed, the data storage and processing required for large scale genomic analysis is seen by some as the biggest of the sources of so-called Big Data and possibly its most challenging aspect [9]. The UK Government has a poor record in both large infrastructure projects and in IT projects, so they are unlikely to make the decision to invest until they know exactly how the data would be utilized and that the required infrastructures are de-risked.

So, while the UK government (and others) might view this as a risky and unjustifiable investment before we really know how to make use of even a fraction of the information it is very possible that some companies might see it as an attractive investment opportunity. It is well known that some of the large IT companies (Apple, Amazon and Microsoft) not only are much closer to having the capabilities to handle the vast amounts of cloud-based data that would result from universal sequencing but also have made significant investments in healthcare opportunities. Google Ventures would be seen as a front runner as they have already invested $1.5bn in healthcare including 23andMe (one of the leading direct-to-consumer sequencing companies) and are “especially interested in companies at the intersection of health and information technology” [10]. Google has already partnered with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and is providing its cloud services with a toolkit developed by the institute that can be used to analyze the data [8].

However, while Google and the others seem the obvious resource to carry out this task there are huge implications in profit-seeking companies holding personal data that could be used to predict what diseases, life styles, behaviors and preferences they may have – theoretically allowing the ultimate targeting of advertising and insurance provision. Currently personal data is protected by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the US’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but these would have to be significantly updated to prevent the highly profitable abuse of data that could happen.

If neither government nor private companies can be trusted to carry this out, are we destined to miss out on the benefits of the secrets that our genomes hold? Possibly not if the obvious solution of a partnership between government and the big IT companies can be set up with the appropriate business model and data protection. A private company could relatively easily set up the two necessary infrastructures of sequencing capability and cloud analytics and I certainly wouldn’t bet against Google either scaling up 23andme or else purchasing one of the major sequencing companies to do this. They could then run the sequencing service for all UK newborns for free and hold their sequences. These sequences would be linked to codes that prevented the company identifying the person involved but the government would hold a master list that linked codes to identities (this is very similar to how clinical trials are run where a private company holds data linked to a reference code but only the hospital can link a reference code to an identity).

As ongoing clinical research discovers new genetic biomarkers the private company could then charge on a “pay per view” basis each time data is accessed by GPs or hospitals. From the payer’s viewpoint it would allow access to the data not only when the information has been researched sufficiently so that it can be made use of but also at the moment it is actually clinically needed.

Academic researchers could hugely accelerate the rate of discovery of new biomarkers by data mining within the stored genomes. They could link genomes to identities and their NHS records (using the master codes), follow them over time and discover the relevance and utility of further DNA sequences. The ability of the private company to do similar data mining would be severely restricted by the lack of access to any health data.

This would appear to be a win/win/win situation; governments do not have to spend money on risky programs before there is any utility in doing so, patients will receive personal and predictive clinical therapy and companies will be able to make profitable returns on investments in areas that they are experts in. Indeed, it could be argued that without this sort of bold public/commercial initiative it will be many years before we start to make real use of genomic data in routine clinical practice.

It would be interesting to canvas opinion on this, let me know of your thoughts.

Richard Owen

Senior Healthcare Innovation Consultant
Connect on LinkedIn

References

[1] UK National Human Genome Research Institute report. Available at https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project/Completion-FAQ
[2] G.E. Moore. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, Electronics, 114–117, April 1965 https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html
[3] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequencing-Costs-Data
[4] https://www.veritasgenetics.com/
[5] Overview of the UK population: August 2019; Office for National Statistics. Available at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/august2019
[6] https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/
[7] Wellcome Trust press release 2016. Available at https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/prime-minister-opens-%C2%A342m-biodata-innovation-centre-and-new-sequencing-facility
[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/07/07/sequencing-the-genome-creates-so-much-data-we-dont-know-what-to-do-with-it/
[9] Stephens et al. PLOS Biology 2015. DOI:10.1371 10 https://www.gv.com/portfolio/

Who hit the jackpot at CES 2020?

January 10th 2020

Chris Houghton

Chris Houghton, CDP’s Brand Innovation Leader reviews the world’s largest consumer product expo, CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Sharing his insights and observations from start-ups to high rollers, all hoping for the jackpot from their latest innovations.

Innovation success or failure is often determined by how a brand or company manages risk. Too cautious and you’re likely to miss the next big thing. Too gung-ho and you will carry the costs for fast-followers to profit from. They’re all here at CES from the multinationals to the one-man-bands and everything in between. However, their need for consumer relevance and competitive advantage is a healthy leveller. I’ve walked the floors speaking to innovation friends old and new whilst navigating this technology metropolis.

There’s palpable excitement around the hot acronyms, 5G, 8K, AI, AR, VR, EVs and GPU technologies that will impact our lives as we enter this new decade. Whilst it’s easy to join the tech-fest party, I try to pick out the consumer benefits, innovations and design attributes that standout from the crowd.

High Rollers…

Big spenders LG and Samsung continue their battle for HD resolution supremacy as 8K Ultra HD becomes certified. Screen size, shape, transparency, bezel free and flexibility (foldable/rollable) are the main design differentiators for screens of all kinds to deliver adaptable entertainment spaces, smart home integration and immersive ‘Real TV’ experiences.

Aces High…

Within Smart Homes refreshments were provided by Keurig Dr Pepper, having partnered with AB InBev to showcase Drinkworks, the in-home cocktail maker using a pod system similar to their K-Cups. In contrast, we also saw start-up PicoBrew with their craft home brewer. In both instances they’re satisfying consumer desires to be the perfect host and enable the inner mixologist or master brewer in all of us. However, they both suffer from being sizeable devices.

In personal care I saw the future facing, simple yet elegant electronic deodorant from Pragrant, designed to sterilize and purify odours via bio-plasma technology without the wetting and stickiness of traditional solutions.

Oralcare had an even greater representation with Colgate’s Plaqless Pro, Philips SoniCare and P&G’s Oral-B iO all vying for the whitest and widest smiles each with different degrees of digital integration and app-based advice.

In grooming, P&G’s notable new launch was from GilletteLabs, a heated razor which endeavours to replicate a hot towel shave with their familiar replaceable shaving head system and business model. P&G’s ventures team also displayed a range of emerging brands that grow and complement the core business.

Intimate wellbeing had an array of offerings on show with our friends at MysteryVibe showing an extended portfolio this year. Entry level Poco and the ‘for him and her’ Tenuto being added to the range supporting the award-winning Crescendo. Myhixel, Ergo-Fit and Lora DiCarlo all had innovative intimacy offerings too.

Sleep Tech was prominent again this year with the SleepScore app being referenced during one of the Digital Health Summit keynotes. I experienced the Climate360 smart bed which can partition and programme thermal preferences to help give you a good night’s sleep.

Eye in the Sky…

Privacy and data protection solutions are well represented within the Smart Cities and Resilience Marketplaces with blockchain, cryptocurrency and cybersecurity featuring heavily. With consumers being increasingly desensitised to terms and conditions or cookies to allow Wi-Fi access or website browsing, companies are preparing themselves for this care-free attitude towards data exchange to potentially change. A notable example to address this was BOB (Blok on Blok), the blockchain phone that decentralises data to allow users to control how their data is used. As its overly industrial aesthetic would imply this doesn’t appear market ready for convenience and image sensitive consumers just yet, but the technology which helps digital payment security will surely find its way into the mainstream sooner rather than later.

All or Nothing…

Against the backdrop of the sobering climate change crisis it was reassuring to see sustainable solutions, but overall this was underrepresented and still feels worryingly low in the minds and agendas of many companies here.

Watergen were ingeniously harvesting drinking water from the air within their Genny, GEN-M and GEN-L units each of which have a shipping container like aesthetic. On a similar water saving theme W’air demonstrated a clever new tool for laundry to help get more wear from your one-time worn clothes with a system that removes odour and bacteria using a fine air/water jet that means less water, detergent and energy is used.

Vehicle Technologies best represented environmental concerns with electric and self-driving vehicles, however, few changed the typical car footprint to help with congestion issues.

Mercedes Benz added a touch of Hollywood glamour with the VISION AVTR which is an Avatar inspired concept car created in collaboration with James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment company. This brooding centerpiece to their stand was largely obscured by a black 360 degree translucent curtain which added to the theatrics. With biomimicry features and a sustainability led agenda this sensorial wonder aims to connect driver and vehicle more closely whilst setting a vision towards the zero-impact car.

Even Sony unveiled a new concept car which unexpectedly overshadowed their main press announcement. Many had anticipated a new game-changing Playstation, but to celebrate its 25th anniversary they shared the new PS5 branding and a range of incremental performance improvements, tantalisingly without showing the console itself.

Royal Flush…

Many brands encourage customers to adopt their services and products across several lifestyle touchpoints, aiming for meaningful experiences that seamlessly sync and fit in different environments. Within Amazon’s exhibition room, they’ve divided their space into people-centric quadrants; Busy Parent, Home Chef, Entertainment Enthusiast and Work-from-home employee. Alexa is the common interface for easy voice activations.

Astonishingly there are over 9,500 different products that are Alexa enabled from brands as diverse as Oral-B to Lamborghini, the latter of which they’ve shamelessly showcased with an eye-catching, orange Huracán Evo (with Alexa controlled entertainment system). Sustainability and privacy credentials are notably absent from their quote styled Vox pops dotted around the spaces, which some may interpret as a potential threat to our connected lives.

Many of these examples fit well with how we tackle innovation opportunities at CDP. Our evidence-based approach is both people-centric and technology enabled to take the ‘gamble’ out of your innovation investments to deliver sustainable and meaningful experiences for all.

Separating new value from clinical trials

November 15th 2019

Richard Owen

Bio-Scientist

Clinical trials are extremely expensive and yet potentially useful information is routinely discarded when conventional methods are used for processing blood samples. Microfluidic technologies offer ways to collect additional biological data from the samples collected and hence deliver much more clinical and potentially financial value from each trial.

It’s well known that pharma clinical trials are extremely expensive to run, typically costing over £10,000 per patient [1]. A routine aspect is the collection of blood samples and analysis of the DNA, RNA and proteins within them. The information is used not only to measure the outcome of the trial, but to collect additional information on how the disease develops, and hopefully, to find new biomarkers that can monitor how the therapy interacts with, the disease processes.

Often methods used to prepare blood samples focus on harvesting one specific biological entity and consequently destroy other components. For example, current methods for collecting DNA will also destroy free proteins, other methods filter out and discard all cellular entities when harvesting cell-free DNA, or else they will discard all other biological components when isolating exosomes [2]. This is wasteful as each blood sample could potentially contain extremely useful clinical information about the disease’s processes and the impact of the therapy, including genomic DNA and mRNA from leukocytes, circulating cell-free DNA, microRNA from exosomes, mRNA/genomic DNA from circulating tumour cells and proteins in plasma.

This is because usually preparation methods collect only one biological component from blood at a time. They are based on methods developed in the 1980’s using phenol and chloroform by Birnboim [3] and then improved upon in the 1990’s by Boom using silica and chaotropes [4]. These were significant advances in their time but were focused on the rapid purification of a single entity from (most commonly) bacterial growth media with minimal interest in what other components were being destroyed by the process. Since then there has been little change and sample preparation is often seen as much less sexy than the many new and exciting technologies that can be used to analyse the resultant purified nucleic acids. However, sample preparation is critical to analysing nucleic acids and is absolutely key to the quality of the final result. Innovation in this area has the potential to be a real game changer.

When using the current destructive methods, to analyse the multiple components in blood you must take more samples from each patient or split each sample into separate sub samples. Patients don’t like giving blood and you can’t collect too great a volume at each blood draw as this depletes their oxygen-carrying capacity and ill oncology patients need their blood! Splitting each sample will not only limit the amount of nucleic acid that can be extracted but also adds significant statistical “noise” as samples begin to show increased variation once they are split into multiple containers, making the vital task of discovering statistical significance in the data much more difficult.

An innovative solution to this challenge would be to utilise microfluidic sample purification methods to harvest all the different components in a blood sample simultaneously without additional stress to the patient and without adding statistical noise. Such a multi-parameter separator would function in an analogous way to how oil is fractionated into many different usable outputs – each one is utilised, and the wastage is minimal. There are many different microfluidic approaches that could be used to achieve this such as standing surface acoustic waves (SAW), pinched flow fractionation, deterministic lateral displacement, optical force switching, inertial microfluidics etc. These technologies require serial and parallel linkage to achieve full utilisation of all the components and could result in 6 different populations of nucleic acid: genomic mRNA + DNA, circulating cell-free DNA, exosome microRNA, mRNA + DNA from circulating tumour cells and plasma proteins.

The potential benefits of these systems are significant as each sample could deliver so much more information for each clinical trial. This information could lead to a deeper understanding of the clinical mechanism of a new therapy being tested, provide additional proof of the clinical benefit and possibly discover new biomarkers that can be used to monitor the impact of a drug in much greater detail. Also, the method could decrease the problem caused in the analysis of both exosomes and CTCs of a large variety of different sample preparation methods, each of which generates slightly different results – this is seen as a key barrier to progress in both fields [5, 6]. When viewed as a cost per additional datapoint delivered and compared to the original cost of the trial, the proposed “fractionator” would deliver significant value. It would create more clinical data with increased statistical significance and also standardisation that could potentially enable the widespread investigation of new biological entities.

[1] – Biopharmaceutical Industry-Sponsored Clinical trials Growing State Economics – April 2019 (The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) (https://www.phrma.org/Resources/State-Map/Clinical-Trials)

[2] – Raymond et al. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0176241

[3] – Birnboim et al. Nucleic Acids Research, 1979, 7: 6, 1513-1523

[4] – Boom et al. J Clin Microbiol, 1990 Mar, 494-503

[5] – Lane et al. Clin Transl Med. 2018 May 31;7(1):14

[6] – van der Toom et al. Oncotarget. 2016 Sep 20;7(38):62754-62766

The patient is center stage at this year’s PDA Europe

November 13th 2019

Clare Beddoes

Head of Drug Delivery

Bastian De Leeuw

The 2019 Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) Europe event was held recently in the beautiful Swedish city of Gothenburg, hosting over 950 attendees, including over 130 exhibiting companies – of which CDP was one. It’s always a great opportunity to catch up with industry colleagues, meet new ones and to hear key insights from expert speakers and poster exhibitors. Bastiaan De Leeuw, Head of Drug Delivery Business Development and Clare Beddoes, Senior Healthcare Innovation Consultant, highlight some of the key learnings from this year’s event as captured in the lecture halls, the exhibition and, of course, the famous PDA party dancefloor!

There was, as always provided so well, a wide variety of disciplines represented, including pharma, device technologists, healthcare charities, payers, regulators and patients – which is fitting, as this year the primary theme was putting the patient first.

The patient was at the center of, not only the plenary talks (including the much anticipated annual slot dedicated to hearing a patient speak), but also the human factors track, as well as many of the poster exhibits and an excellent home styled ‘Patient Pavilion’, hosted by AstraZeneca and Matchstick – providing delegates the opportunity to meet and listen to two patients and a caregiver, dealing with chronic conditions requiring regular self-injection.

There were many illuminating sessions, such as Designing for the behaviour you would like to see; focusing on the patient and the mindset of living with chronic disease and reducing the burden of treatment. Another; Patient centered design and digital health, showed us that, the burden of disease management has gradually shifted to the patient, via modifying or developing drug products intended for self-injection, as well as patient-led symptoms tracking, and (often) the need to manage co-morbidities. Those sessions concluded that drug delivery solutions, whether digital or not, should seek to personalise the experience for patients and reduce the treatment burden as much as possible. As such, Pharma is increasingly viewing drug delivery as a way to gain competitive advantage.

In addition to the 2 full days of conference content, PDA are famous for hosting a themed party at every event and this year was no exception! The 70s style disco fever party had many attendees in impressive outfits, and – as fellow children of the ‘70’s – it got us thinking about drug delivery within this context.

Technology then and now

We heard about the ‘journey’ a type 1 diabetes patient has been on whilst managing his chronic condition. He spoke of the early days of checking blood glucose monitoring sticks with colour charts on the bottle, paper diaries and calculators to work out dosing, all the way through to his experience of the ‘digitalisation’ of self-treatment of today; showing us his Freestyle Libre CGM, mobile App and the small lightweight (and discreet) insulin pump he now wears. This made us think; many of the products we see on the market today such as pre-filled syringes, autoinjectors and on-body delivery systems (pumps or bolus devices) were not even on the radar when the music we danced to at PDA was first released. What devices of the future have we not yet even thought of? What do (and will) patients really need and why?

The disco generation – the digital conundrum

Digitalisation and connectivity – with the patient experience in mind – were also huge themes. This raised the question of whether all patients need or want blinking lights and colourful screens, or if these really provide the cues, feedback and motivation needed to enable or facilitate the correct use of their device to get the full benefit from the therapy? Ask yourself why are you connecting the device? How will you provide that connectivity, does the device itself need to be connected? What data will you collect, for whom, and what action do you want based on that data? The last thing patients need is for digital technology to add to the burden of managing their chronic condition.

Answers are dependent on variables such as the disease, the drug, the patient cohort and the needs within those; but what is clear it’s not just about collecting data for data’s sake – don’t add to the patient burden. Disco was the last popular music movement driven by the baby boom generation – are those the most prevalent patients of today? Do you truly understand your patient cohorts, their differing needs and then design with those in mind? Do you understand how your devices are actually being used by patients in the home setting?

On our conference booth we presented a ‘Digital Roadmap Toolkit’, that includes our proprietary diialog™ service (a bespoke approach to find out what patients are really doing with their devices) that can help companies – at any point on their digital journey – unlock the value of digital, with reduced risk.

Budgets then and now

The phrase ‘user needs’ was mentioned by almost every speaker, but what do we mean by needs and who is the user? The patient clearly; but there are often very different needs amongst caregivers, healthcare providers (particularly in developing countries), payers and regulators. For example, the payer will commonly ask 3 key questions; what are the unmet needs (aka why is the ‘new’ treatment better than what’s available today)? What’s wrong with the current standard of care? What’s the trade-off to be made (e.g. cost, safety, utility)? Today’s patients and providers are facing ever tightening healthcare budgets and increasing moves to outcome-based reimbursement, so value must be demonstrated.
Whilst we were told it is the drug and not the device that is currently top of the charts for most payers; as more and more pharma companies focus on the device as a differentiator, studies that demonstrate that the device helps the drug to be more effective will become key. Payers require real world data and the measurement of outcomes; in fact, they can often help companies set the most appropriate end points for a trial. Therefore, some were asking – are we moving towards shared risk between pharma and payers?

That’s the way I like it

Fittingly for a conference focused on improving patient health through improved drug delivery; we danced to “Stayin’ Alive”, “Don’t stop ‘til you get enough” and “That’s the way I like it”! So how best to understand user needs from all perspectives? CDP has a tried and tested methodology (Insight for Healthcare Innovation) which starts by determining the key user groups and designs a bespoke and ‘solution agnostic’ research programme to understand their unmet needs. This is appropriate not only when designing ‘new’ devices, but also when ensuring current devices are ‘fit for purpose’ for each intended user group e.g. age distribution, indication, co-morbidities, stage of the drug lifecycle.

Here at CDP, the user and their needs are at the core of our technology and product development capability. Whether for lifecycle management, platform refinement, or next generation devices, we can help companies understand who their users are, what they need and, therefore, help drive successful innovation in new devices and treatment experiences.

Can sleep tech become ubiquitous?

October 15th 2019

A good night’s sleep is increasingly considered to be just as important for our health and well-being as eating healthy food and exercising regularly. Unfortunately, today’s 24/7 high-stimulus, digital world is renowned for disrupting our natural sleep patterns. The average 21st century human is now sleeping significantly less than in the past. In 2017, McKinsey reported that more than one in three Americans does not get enough sleep – roughly the same number who are obese.

What is more, our sleep quality – as well as quantity – has decreased as well.

This emerging need has created an ecosystem of manufacturers, retailers and health service providers as well as pharmaceutical companies that has formed around sleep health. The McKinsey study reported the US sleep-health industry is currently worth between $30 billion to $40 billion and has historically grown by more than 8 percent per year, with few signs of slowing down.

In addition to the traditional categories of clinics, pharmaceuticals and bedroom furniture and bedding, a new wave of sleep gadgets has emerged. Crowd funding sites are full of novel sleep devices from masks to robots. Many are connected, continuing the trend of measuring and connecting our lives. Some even aim to stimulate the brain to create therapeutic effects.

Certainly sleep is becoming better understood, but scientific knowledge is still at a relatively early stage and this equates to a general lack of understanding through the population, government and mainstream industry.

“It’s an exciting time for the emerging sleep-ware industry”, says Clare Beddoes of Cambridge Design Partnership: “Here at CDP, we believe that sleep-tech is an exciting area that is evolving rapidly, following closely on the heels of the developments in the fitness and wellness sphere, which has seen an explosion of innovation in recent years”.

“We’re already working with companies assisting them in defining opportunities to innovate and we expect many interesting and successful advances in the area of sleep technology in the near future.”

With this in mind, here are five basic questions we think you need to ask if you are planning to bring a new sleep-tech product to market. If you have the answers to these then, with any luck, you won’t be losing sleep over your product development!

1. Can you show that your customers actually need your proposed product?

It’s great to have an idea for a product that you think might be the answer to an insomniac’s prayers. But are you sure it’s what the market really wants, needs and will pay for? Our approach is to start with the user and to identify the unmet needs where solutions will be really valued. This makes sure you’re heading in the right direction before you spend a lot of time and money pursuing a new idea.

2. What is the existing competitive landscape for similar products?

We’re fascinated by the plethora of sleep devices on the market and although it is increasingly crowded, we believe that the market is in an early phase and there are most definitely spaces for products that address the needs of broad market groups. So take the time to find out what the competition is and where the spaces are for innovation for the majority of mainstream consumers.

3. Where do market unmet needs align with technical solutions that can improve sleep?

The aim must be to create the must-have sleep-tech product. Just recently, here at CDP we worked on a technology to monitor REM sleep. We discovered that not only did users want to know how much REM sleep they had every night, they wanted to know whether it was enough and, then, crucially, they wanted to know what to do if it wasn’t. Successful products need to close this loop and not leave customers stranded.

4. What is the best revenue model for your concept?

This is crucial in the digital world. Will your product work if sold for a one-off payment or would it be a better proposition as the start of a relationship with your customer? Will customers pay for every night they sleep better, or will they not notice the difference? In the AI enabled world consumers are beginning to expect customised solutions, continuous updates and evidence- based feedback.

5. Who are the most impactful sleep professionals for you to work with?

To develop and launch your product successfully, you’re going to need clinical and scientific back-up. So, do you need to work with doctors, psychologists, clinical researchers or YouTube sleep experts? Should you be turning to the peer consumer community, personal trainers or artificial intelligence? It’s all about finding the best development support route and final endorsement.

That way, your innovation journey will stand the best chance of seeing those sweet dreams of success become a reality.

Why are music festivals leading the sustainability agenda?

September 24th 2019

Matt Morris

In 2019 the music festival industry experienced a sea change in their attitude to single-use plastic, with many large live events making the decision to ban it altogether. As the festival season draws to a close, CDP’s Matt Morris, mechanical engineer, sustainability expert and live music fan, looks at what product designers can learn from festival greening in 2019.

Matt says: The big change in the world of festivals this year was the move away from single-use plastics, all part of a general shift towards sustainability and better environmental practices at live music events.

In February 2019 the UK’s biggest festival, Glastonbury, announced it was banning single-use plastic bottles – saving the production of a million plastic bottles. Then many others followed, pledging to stop single use plastics by 2021.

Here at Cambridge Design Partnership, our aim is always to design out unnecessary waste so our clients are as sustainable as possible. So having attended several festivals myself this summer, and having seen the changes taking place first-hand, I am struck by what we can learn from these temporary communities as they strive to go plastic-free.

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Starting with a closed system

Cutting out single-use plastic and greening your market is easier in a small enclosed community where the same organisation controls both the input of products and output of waste. This is, of course, the case at a music festival, where the sale, distribution and disposal of plastic is all within the remit of the same festival organisers.

It is far more straightforward, for example, for Emily Eavis to announce that Glastonbury is banning plastic bottles given that all the drink sales points and backstage hospitality facilities are licensed by Glastonbury Festival itself. The festival also organises the collection and recycling of waste after use, which means they are heavily invested in getting the recycling and disposal right.

However, in the wider world, communities and nations are faced with a far more challenging and fragmented proposition. Traditionally supply chains are one way, from manufacturers to consumers, and are motivated by maximising sales and minimising costs. Consumers are not encouraged by manufacturers to see any value in packaging, they often believe it is somehow free so don’t value the materials and energy encapsulated within it. In addition, waste systems are there to collect and dispose of packaging in isolation of its use and production. This means there is little incentive to coordinate the cycle of production, use and recycling. Although some forward thinking communities are now aiming to change this, for example via the plastic-free towns movement.

Here at CDP, we have been working with food service providers to create plastic-free packaging for closed environments such as transport systems, schools and hospitals. This allows those in charge of these institutions the choice to remove single-use plastic, and can act as a test bed for new solutions prior to more widespread adoption.

Considering the alternatives

Many festivals in 2019 chose to replace disposable plastic cups with sturdier ones that could be reused at any bar within the grounds. However, I was intrigued to see that plastic pint glasses were replaced at Glastonbury this year by stainless steel tumblers. These cost £5 each to buy and festivalgoers could either keep them or return them for a full refund on departure. It seems that the backlash against plastic has extended beyond just single-use plastics, prompting designers to consider materials that would not have been on the table just a few years ago.

However, material selection needs careful consideration. In terms of its impact on the planet, a steel cup may need to be reused many more times than a re-useable plastic one to offer a net benefit. Good design can help with this conundrum, by creating things that are a joy to use again and again. Judging by the fact that the Glastonbury 2019 stainless steel cups are now selling for £12 on eBay, leveraging the Glasto brand seems to have worked in this case!

It helps to engage with cultural influencers

Changing consumer habits takes significant effort. But at Glastonbury this year, I lost count of the performers who lent their approval to the plastic-free initiative. From rappers to rockers, many of the artists (who could only drink canned water on stage) spoke out during their sets in favour of the plastics ban, helping it to gain traction with a captive and approving audience.

What’s more, within the festival setting, there are dozens of ways to keep the initiative in the crucial ‘top of mind’ spot for peak consumer awareness. With kiosks everywhere offering free water and selling reusable cups, a festival is a great place to pioneer sustainable practices and encourage early adopters.

To replicate this in the wider economy is less immediate but not impossible. Frequent positive reinforcement through influencers, marketing and advertising does eventually have an impact.

Taking a holistic view

One of the ways in which CDP designs genuinely more sustainable products is by analysing the impact of the product through its entire life cycle. At festivals, it can be all too easy to take the feelgood option while the real environmental implications are more complex.

For example, the widespread switch at festivals this year to disposable cardboard or wood food packaging instead of plastic may create that positive vibe – but does it have less conspicuous drawbacks? It certainly reduces plastic waste, which is a very visible problem, but equally crushing a tree down into small fibres, mixing the wood pulp into a slurry and then passing it through huge rollers takes lots of energy and water. By contrast, plastic is light, durable and its manufacture is generally not particularly energy intensive. So we may be trading a plastic waste problem for an energy and water problem.

And if we rolled out this transition globally, could our forests (which, frankly, are in need of some TLC right now) support the demand for wood and pulp? It’s important to factor this into your environmental calculations before making a knee-jerk decision to switch materials or abandon plastic packaging. As designers, we have an obligation to weigh up these impacts, because it’s not fair to expect every consumer to have the necessary expertise.

At CDP we work with major beauty product manufacturers to develop packaging and products. Often, it’s important to look at the way the product is used, as well as its constituent parts, before making changes. For example, there can be as much benefit to the planet from encouraging consumers to switch off a running tap when brushing their teeth (wasting potable water and its processing and distribution energy) as there would be from asking them to switch to a bamboo toothbrush. At CDP we look at the entire lifecycle of a product, and the context in which it is used, to get a clear view of all the impacts on the planet.

This holistic view is also the key to creating genuinely innovative sustainable products and services. As consumers grow ever more discerning and the environmental movement becomes the mainstream, this approach will be critical to successful and sustainable product innovation.