Florence Nightingale, the “founding mother” of Nursing as an institution, intuitively knew the importance of design principles when she redesigned hospitals to improve patient outcomes during the Crimean War (1853).

While Nursing Informatics is a field, Design and Nursing is not as well-defined or established and it is lamentable given that there seems to be an undeniable overlap with patient-centered care and human-centered design.

Nurses take on many roles, such as advocate and educator, that could benefit from being well-versed in design in order to make health information more accessible not only to patients and their families but to other health care practitioners.

Below is an example of a traditional “PICOT Poster”, a standard research poster presentation format. These posters tend to be dense with information and has limited accessibility due to the content and type format.

I created the poster below for a nursing research class (which was selected to be presented at the Eastern Nursing Research Society conference this Spring 2017). While the poster content is still dense, I incorporated the use of bright colors and simple graphics to draw in the viewer as well as create easy to reference “talking points” for whomever visits our poster during the conference.

For another poster presentation on the topic of Pressure Ulcer Prevention, I created a supplementary handout to provide basic information as well as an interactive activity to engage viewers about the subject matter.

And while research posters is one area that could benefit from improved design, there are also the day-to-day interactions amongst health care professionals. For example, at a health career fair I made and wore the following stickers in order to make it easier for recruiters to immediately see what my interests are as a new nurse graduate: