The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is one of the world’s premier cancer centers committed to patient care, research and educational programs. The hospital is designing and planning a new chemotherapy treatment center in Brooklyn “to envision a network of community-based, state-of-the-art outpatient chemotherapy treatment facilities that bring our expert care into the context of patients’ own communities and lives.”

As an adjunct faculty member at Parsons’ School of Design Strategies, I worked in collaboration with faculty members Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski, Cameron Tonkinwise and research assistant Savitri Lopez Negrete, to develop and lead a workshop for 18 members of the hospital staff. The goal of the workshop was to educate the staff at Memorial Sloan-Kettering on service design methods by focusing on the identification of new service opportunities at all points during the patient journey.

Beginning with materials produced by IDEO for Memorial Sloan-Kettering, our activities included mapping out the service journey to uncover the processes that constitute the service, isolating possible fail points and establishing the time frame for the journey. Other activities included developing personas that synthesized the goals, behaviors, skills and attitudes of a real individual, identifying new potential service areas by imagining what the individuals feel, do and think while interacting with the existing services, creating polarity maps to orient the idea generation, and selecting and describing the most promising scenarios for each service area.