RIF fellows targeting health care, design

DESIGNER THREADS: DownCity Design’s Adrienne Gagnon intends to use her fellowship to build a fleet of mobile design labs outfitted with tools and media. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
DESIGNER THREADS: DownCity Design’s Adrienne Gagnon intends to use her fellowship to build a fleet of mobile design labs outfitted with tools and media. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

In its inaugural Innovation Fellowships last year, The Rhode Island Foundation funded two projects with undeniable commercial potential built around growing retail and arts-centered startups.

This year the foundation chose two new fellows, The Miriam Hospital’s Dr. Lynn Taylor and DownCity Design Executive Director Adrienne Gagnon, from the medical and education sectors respectively, instead of from the business world.

Taylor wants to eradicate Hepatitis C in Rhode Island through education, testing and expanded treatment of the disease.

Gagnon wants to teach design skills to a generation of students through school curriculum and hands-on experience.

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Like last year’s fellows – Allan Tear and Soren Ryherd – Taylor and Gagnon will receive $100,000 in each of the next three years to try to make their lofty goals a reality, thanks to underwriting by John and Letitia Carter.

Although both plans have altruistic underpinnings, they do touch issues with significant economic consequences for the state and region.

The cost of treating patients with Hepatitis C has been growing as more baby boomers infected between 1960 and 1990 begin showing symptoms of the disease.

Direct medical costs can reach $500,000 for the final year of a patient’s life, Taylor said, and then there are the indirect costs to families and of taking someone out of the labor force during prime working years.

Design talent, from architecture to graphic and industrial design, has been singled out as one of Rhode Island’s best assets at a time when technical skills are in high demand.

Like Rhode Island School of Design President John Maeda, Gagnon, a RISD graduate, is a believer in the fusion of art and design skills with science, math and engineering skills – so-called STEM to STEAM – as a potent economic force.

“We’re framing this as a way to help drive the economy, as well as educate,” Gagnon said. “Ideally we are helping the next generation develop the skills they will need to be leaders themselves and be adaptable people.”

Although separate from DownCity Design, Gagnon’s plans for the fellowship funding are an outgrowth of her work at the nonprofit.

At DownCity, Gagnon seeks out problems students have identified in their school or community and empowers them to design solutions.

For the fellowship project, Gagnon’s design-education plan has two parts.

First, she intends to build a fleet of mobile design labs outfitted with tools and media that can be moved to schoolyards and other locations throughout the state.

Early plans suggest the labs will be built out of shipping containers for their low cost and ease of mobility, but Gagnon said she is open to other ideas.

Designing a prototype lab will be one of the first goals of the project this spring. In addition to gathering local designers to work on the project, Gagnon hopes to involve young people in the planning, using creation of the learning space as another opportunity to teach.

How much it costs to eventually build each mobile lab will determine how many Gagnon is able to roll out. She intends to have at least one in service in the first year and four by the end of the third.

Once the mobile labs are up and running, observations of students using them will fuel the second part of the fellowship project: developing a comprehensive design curriculum.

Eventually, Gagnon hopes to make the design curriculum available to schools and programs in Rhode Island and across the country.

While previous fellowship winners have worked toward establishing a permanent, independent, self-sustaining organization outliving the grant, Gagnon said she is not sure whether that will be the case with her project.

For Taylor, who treats patients with HIV and Hepatitis C, the Innovation Fellowship is an opportunity to fund a public-health initiative that has often been left out of federal grants.

“Hepatitis C hasn’t been addressed because people who know see it as a money-losing issue,” Taylor said.

Hepatitis C is a virus transmitted through blood that often goes undetected for years before resulting in liver failure.

Intravenous drug use and blood transfusions in the latter half of the last century were primary causes of the disease, the effects of which are now being felt as the large population exposed during that period starts seeing symptoms.

While the attention and medical advances have seen rapid success in managing HIV, Taylor said the same is possible with Hepatitis C.

Through the Innovation Fellowship, Taylor plans to launch a Hepatitis C awareness campaign, including a themed WaterFire lighting in July 2014, a Hepatitis C poster-design competition judged by Shepard Fairey, and creation of a wearable symbol of support for the cause, such as a bracelet.

After bringing attention to and fighting the stigma often attached to the disease, Taylor said the focus turns to increasing access to Hepatitis C testing, then increasing treatment options and finally evaluating the results to publish the most effective methods.

For those latter steps, Taylor said it is likely that resources beyond the Innovation Fellowship will be needed.

Because the number of new infections has been shrinking and advancements in treating the disease are coming rapidly, Taylor said a coordinated effort in a compact state like Rhode Island could bring dramatic results.

“It’s a lofty goal, and I don’t mean that we will eradicate it entirely in Rhode Island in three years, but that should be the goal,” Taylor said. “I have gone to too many funerals of people too young to die.”

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