Jan Carel Diehl: 'We need healthcare, while we must also take care of our environment'

Medical Delta professor Dr. Jan Carel Diehl (TU Delft) delivered his inaugural lecture last Friday. He combines solutions for healthcare with care for our planet. His many projects make an impact from Rotterdam to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jan Carel Diehl is not only a Medical Delta professor but also one of the program leaders of the Medical Delta program 'Sustainable Hospitals – from Science to Practice.' This interview was previously published on the website of Industrial Design at TU Delft (text by Bregt Timmerman).

TU Delft’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineeirng (IDE) was founded the same year you were born. Why did you choose design studies?

In secondary school I was good at physics, so I was destined to study electrical engineering in Twente. But I had other interests too - sketching, drawing models in the academy class, and volunteering for the school theatre. I found a combination of creativity and technology at IDE in Delft. My parents had some difficulties understanding what ‘industrial design’ actually meant, but for me it was the perfect match. At IDE you can work with your imagination, create stories, and put them into practice.

You have a particular interest in healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. Where does that come from?

Here in the Netherlands, we have many researchers and designers focussed on relatively small problems. Whereas, in Sub-Saharan Africa there are far fewer, despite the challenges and opportunities being enormous.

We don't actually know that much about how people in this part of the world live. What is their care path? What can be produced locally? As a designer you get a lot of space to properly identify problems and develop interventions to improve the situation.

Before I ended up in healthcare I worked on a number of other social challenges. Like solar energy, sanitation in slums, and on clean cooking. Many people cook with biomass, ingesting foul smoke. The question is, how can we prevent this? 

I started to realise we could do a lot of great things around health in this region. Also, TU Delft boasts a rich and valuable ecosystem dedicated to healthcare research and education. TU Delft Global Initiative, for example, brings together and supports researchers who want to do things in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a designer, I can also bring something to the table; all the beautiful tech that is developed at the university sometimes has trouble finding its way to society. A designer can facilitate this.

During your inaugural lecture, you talk about collaboration with stakeholders. What makes a designer so good at networking?

Actually, networking doesn’t come naturally to me. At school I volunteered in the theatre... but always behind the scenes. (The few lines I was given on stage were no great success.) But I did learn networking as I went along. After my studies, for instance, I helped build a startup on social sustainability in the US. And one day I was asked to give a presentation to a group of people from the United Nations. I was completely inexperienced in networking, but that turned out not to be a problem. The thing is that people come to you of their own accord when you are the one on the stage, so making the initial contact is quite easy that way.

A designer knows a lot of skills. Mechanics, ergonomics, marketing, for example. We don't always dive deep into every topic, but we speak all languages. This allows us to offer a valuable contribution to the conversation. A contribution that is useful for companies, governments, and certainly also for science. Increasingly, organisations want a designer there from the start.

The field in which you navigate is incredibly broad and complex. How do you maintain an overview?

Sometimes the things I do seem chaotic, because I am involved in so many different projects. Do they interlink? It may not appear that way, yet they are connected. With each subsequent step in my career, my view of things becomes a little clearer. To the point where I can even explain my principle of ‘systemic design’ to my young son's classmates. As humans, we have some challenges. We need care, and we need to care for our environment. To combine the two, we must first look at the overall picture. How do people see things? How do they interact with each other? Based on that, we develop products and services that can provide concrete solutions to some of these questions.