Philips

Imagining healthcare products in 2050

A hand holding an transparent card — Renting bodies, ingesting 30 years of guilt, buildings that publicise physical discomfort, digital transmission of emotions and memories

A woman holding a glowing box and a group of elderly people haivng a dinner party — We started with research with people who have direct experience with isolation and chronic health conditions

Problem

Philips needed future scenarios and product concepts to spark internal discussion about healthcare in 2050 — specifically around social isolation in the home. The challenge wasn’t a lack of ideas, it was a lack of rigour: concept work at that scale often produces blue-sky thinking that’s disconnected from real people’s lives and impossible to evaluate or prioritise.

A spreadsheet with future predictions from science fiction

Process design

Together with Angela Oguntala, I designed and led the end-to-end process for four multi-disciplinary Philips teams. I built a structured futures database — drawing from science, literature, and art — and adapted the Manoa Scenario Building method to give each team a rigorous starting point for world-building. From there, each team conducted user research with people experiencing social isolation and chronic health conditions, developed speculative scenarios, designed future products, and prototype-tested with real participants.

Scans of ideas sketch on paper as word clouds, and short stories — Early ideas allowed groups to world-build and share their ideas, getting feedback and building out core aspects of their scenarios

Chart that shows where four projects are plotted on a timeline — Each group focused on a unique technology and social challenge to generate diverse concepts across a patient's lifetime

I introduced a scoring matrix from strategic foresight to let teams and stakeholders compare every research finding, concept, and prototype on a consistent scale. This gave Philips a defendable way to select which directions to develop further — transforming subjective creative output into evidence-based decisions.

A matrix of questions that you can use to evaluate concepts and research findings — I used this matrix to score (between 5 – 25) and prioritise each significant concept, insight and conclusion

Result

Each team delivered a short film presenting a realistic, morally ambiguous future — neither utopian nor dystopian — designed to force viewers to examine their own values. I provided hands-on creative coding, film-making, and narrative guidance to all four teams throughout.

The project gave Philips a framework to explore how healthcare can meet holistic human needs over the next 10–20 years. More significantly, it changed how their teams approached future concept work — giving them a repeatable, evidence-grounded process they could apply independently going forward.