SEEDR presented “Bridging the Relevancy Gap: An innovation-design methodology for value engineering the redesign of vaccine cold chain transport containers” at the 2010 Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics.
SEEDR developed the work under its “Reengineering (Reverse) Cold Chain” initiative in partnership with the Global Immunization Division, US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Early in SEEDR’s research it became apparent that how the users packed, carried, and interacted with the product was an especially significant factor in determining the success or failure of the cold chain in immunization programs in developing countries.
Yet despite the importance of proper usage, these products lack of relevancy with end users. They can be difficult or ambiguous to use properly and seem not to resonate with the global set of users.
If new technology and product design were to be an effective way to reduce the chances and consequence of user error and overcome this gap, SEEDR would have to maximize the way in which it informed its design process. Overcoming the distance, cultural, and perceptual barriers to connect the design process to the end-user will help form the engineering and design parameters, ultimately driving the containers’ thermomechanical structure, materials composition, physical geometries, visual communications and user instructions, ergonomics and carrying methods.
The resulting design-strategy methodology has produced promising results thus far, “reveal[ing] previously uncontextualized behavioral patterns and failure points, connected the designers to a global sample of users, and facilitated user input and simulation and survey data to drive decision making.”
The relevancy gap between designers/manufacturers and the end users pervades many of the products upon which those in developing countries rely. SEEDR believes the methods developed could have potential in addressing the relevancy gap for other products important to health, development, and humanitarian logistics.
The work’s authors included Michael Moreland, SEEDR strategist and managing director, Victoria Gammino, epidemiologist with the Global Immunization Division, US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Sue Gerber, public health advisor with the Global Immunization Division, US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and Scott Wellman, SEEDR’s lead cold-chain engineer.
SEEDR’s partners at the Tennenbaum Institute also presented the work they have been doing under the SEEDR cold-chain initiative. Trustin Clear and William Rouse presented the methodology of the discrete event simulation (DES) model they have built to quantify the effects of transport equipment in the immunization cold chain.
The model simulates the relationships between specific cold chain equipment, the vaccine and ice they container carry, and the climatic conditions and duration of given nodes in the chain. With the ability to simulate the conditions and durations for any link in any chain, the model allows SEEDR to simulate any given combination of conditions the containers might encounter, including transport delays and unexpected temperature extremes. These simulations, run hundreds of thousands of times at every possible permutation, show the wherewithal and systemic consequences of different types of equipment under different conditions.
SEEDR can model the impact of various design decisions and, by placing the primary and higher-order benefits of improved cold chain containers in the context of these simulated environments and real-world scenarios, begin to assess the value created by equipment innovation in immunization programs.
The Georgia Tech’s Health & Humanitarian Logistics Center, a unit of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute hosts the annual conference, now in its second year, at the Georgia Tech hotel in Tech Square in Atlanta, Georgia. This year’s conference featured speakers from US Department of Homeland Security, UN World Food Programme, Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), American Red Cross, US Africa Command (AFRICOM), Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy at Tulane University, United Parcel Service (UPS), CARE International, Clinton Foundation, and more.
—————–
DOWNLOAD the “Bridging the Relevancy Gap” abstract.
DOWNLOAD the “Bridging the Relevancy Gap” poster.
SEEDR’s poster on display at the 2010 Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics.
