1. Education

Design Resources

The Health Sciences Design program offers a variety of reference materials to help inform students through the course of their projects. Additionally, an inventory of prototyping materials — from craft supplies to fabrication equipment — enables students to make ideas tangible and begin testing and refining concepts. All of this is embedded in a program that centers on opportunities for knowledge sharing and collaborative learning.

The online and on-campus resources listed here are provided as a supplement to in-class experiences and are for information purposes only. They include information on health care challenges and the technical skills to tackle design problems.

Explore Health-Related Design Needs

  • Emergency Makers Network: Connects medical professionals with makers of open-source medical supplies.
  • e-NABLE: Connects a global community of humanitarian volunteers to people in need of prosthetics.
  • ICHOM Connect: Develops and shares data on standard outcome measures sought by health seekers based on their health challenges.
  • Makers Making Change: Facilitates the development of open-source assistive technologies for people with disabilities.
  • MakerForce: Engages volunteers to develop, donate, and distribute supplies for emergency needs.
  • Motivation: Promotes the development of mobility aids for people in the Global South.
  • Nesta Challenges: Crowdsources solutions to societal challenges, including many with a health focus.
  • Open Source Medical Supplies: Engages community members (from lay people to experts) in the production of supplies to meet global public health crises.
  • Wazoku: Hosts a crowdsourcing forum for examining design problems.

Learn Design Skills

  • Adobe & Arizona at UArizona Digital Learning: Offers tutorials, events and other resources for digital design and fabrication with Adobe products.
  • CATalyst Studios at University Libraries: Offers consulting, workshops and certifications for UX design, crafting skills and fabrication equipment; also hosts a Discord community for sharing ideas and announcements
  • Equity Meets Design: Offers training, best practice guidance and various resources for equity-focused design.
  • Design Kit: Shares methods, mindsets and examples to help collaborative design processes.
  • Fabricademy, Textile Academy on Vimeo: Hosts a video library of tutorials and presentations on topics such as Arduinos, natural dyes and wearable electronics.
  • freeCodeCamp: Provides coding tutorials and certifications.
  • HackadayU: Offers free (donations accepted) courses on coding, CAD and other topics.
  • IDEO: Offers a wide range of content and resources for new, intermediate and advanced design thinking users, including a blog, podcast, toolkits and courses.
  • Open Office Hours: Offers consultations on digital health methods, product strategy and other topics as a free service of GoInvo, a Boston-based digital design company.

Browse Prototypes

  • Appropedia: Maintains a wiki dedicated to sustainable development, including medical and safety supplies that are appropriate for the “environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political and economical context” of its uses.
  • Instructables Living: Health: Hosts a design repository founded by the MIT Media Lab.
  • MakeOpaedics: Promotes the development of open-source orthopedics hardware.
  • MyMiniFactory: Hosts an open-source repository of 3D printable files.
  • Open Source Hardware Association: Hosts a collaborative project repository that includes solutions for environmental and life sciences.

Engage Communities + Collaborators

  • Acumen Academy: Offers free and low-cost courses on social entrepreneurship, including business model development, financial literacy and evaluation methods.
  • Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team: Uses open mapping tools to promote public health and humanitarian action
  • Society for Participatory Medicine: Shares an e-book, free webinars and other resources about the e-patient movement and patient engagement in health care.
  • Story of Self: Provides a free personal storytelling template to engage end users and help designers notice, empathize and define.
  • Strategyzer: Canvas, Tools & Guides: Offers free canvas templates in PDF format for brainstorming business models, value propositions, value maps and other start-up strategy essentials.
  • University of Arizona GIS: Provides an interactive mapping platform for geo-spatially visualizing stories (public for browsing but restricted to UArizona affiliates for content creation).

Present + Publish

  • AutoDraw: Uses machine learning and a drawing library to convert freehand sketches and doodles into presentation-quality icons and line art.
  • Data Viz Project: Hosts a visual glossary of chart, diagram and graph types with brief descriptions of their best uses.
  • diagrams.net: Offers free, cloud-based software for creating charts and infographics from customizable templates, with SVG, PNG and JPEG output options.
  • How to create a better research poster in less time: Provides a video overview and link to templates to create academic posters based on based practices in visual and written communication.
  • Paletton: Hosts an interactive color palette for developing color schemes.
  • Surgery Redesign: Provides a free primer for preparing visual abstracts to disseminate findings.

Access 3D Modeling + Printing Resources

Access UX/UI and Visual Design Resources