Tools Across Three Disciplines

As I look across engineering, design, and healthcare, I am struck by how much they have in common. Although each discipline uses different tools, the underlying process is surprisingly similar:

Understand the problem → explore solutions → make them tangible → test → improve.

The biggest difference is not necessarily what they do, but how they approach each step and what they are trying to optimize.

1. Understanding the Problem

In engineering, understanding a problem often means analyzing and modeling a system, identifying variables, and finding the root cause.

In design, the starting point is often people and context. Designers use research, interviews, observation, and other methods to understand why a product or experience is not meeting expectations.

Healthcare is different because clinicians often have to make decisions with incomplete information. They may not know the root cause at the beginning. Instead, they use assessment, clinical reasoning, and evidence to develop possible explanations and gradually narrow them down.

This is one of the things I find most interesting about healthcare: the solution often needs to move forward before the problem is completely defined. Clinicians continuously gather evidence, assess probabilities, and adjust their thinking as new information emerges.

2. Exploring and Making Solutions Tangible

Engineers can use mathematical models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate ideas before physically building them. By changing variables and testing scenarios, they can predict whether a solution is likely to work.

Designers have a different advantage: they can make ideas tangible very quickly. A simple sketch can communicate an idea, invite feedback, and help narrow down possibilities before significant resources are invested.

In healthcare, clinicians develop intervention or treatment plans based on the patient's condition, clinical evidence, professional judgment, and individual circumstances. They consider both potential benefits and risks.

Although the tools are different, the underlying question is similar:

What are our options, and which one is most likely to achieve the desired outcome?

3. Testing and Validation

All three disciplines test whether their solutions actually work—but they use different standards for judging success.

Engineers may test a solution under different temperatures, loads, environments, or durations to evaluate reliability, consistency, and durability.

Designers test with different users, contexts, cultures, abilities, and scenarios to understand whether an experience is understandable, useful, usable, and desirable.

Healthcare uses clinical evaluation and outcome measurement to determine whether an intervention is effective and safe.

The questions become:

Engineering: Does it perform reliably and consistently?

Design: Does it create a useful, usable, and desirable experience?

Healthcare: Does it improve the patient's outcome safely and effectively?

4. Continuous Improvement

All three disciplines also share a commitment to improvement.

Engineers optimize designs and fine-tune variables to improve performance, reliability, efficiency, and durability.

Designers iterate based on what they learn from users.

Healthcare uses measurement and quality improvement approaches such as Lean, Six Sigma, and PDSA to improve efficiency, reliability, and safety.

This is where I see a particularly strong connection between engineering and healthcare. Both place significant emphasis on reducing unnecessary variation and increasing reliability—while healthcare must also account for the inherent variability of human beings.

And the stakes are much higher. Variation in a manufacturing process might result in an imperfect product; variation in healthcare can affect a person's health or safety.

5. Collaboration in an Increasingly Connected World

Another commonality is the growing importance of collaboration.

As problems become more complex, no single person or discipline can hold all the knowledge needed to solve them. At the same time, information, technology, behaviors, and ideas move rapidly across disciplines and around the world.

The more interconnected the world becomes, the more important it is to bring different perspectives together.

6. What Are We Ultimately Optimizing?

Looking across these three disciplines has helped me see their fundamental differences more clearly.

Engineering is primarily concerned with performance and reliability.

The goal is to create something that works consistently and can withstand the conditions it was designed for.

Design is primarily concerned with human experience.

The goal is not simply to make something work, but to create an experience that is useful, usable, and desirable—while also being feasible to build and viable for the organization.

Healthcare has to consider both.

A healthcare solution needs to be effective, efficient, reliable, and safe, but it also needs to consider the experience of the person receiving care.

A care plan can be clinically effective and operationally efficient, yet still create a poor patient experience. Conversely, an experience can feel wonderful but fail to produce the desired clinical outcome.

Healthcare therefore has to continuously balance:

standardization with personalization, consistency with human variability, and efficiency with experience.

The more I reflect on these three disciplines, the more I see them not as completely separate ways of thinking, but as different lenses for navigating complexity.

Engineering helps us understand and control systems.

Design helps us understand and shape human experiences.

Healthcare asks us to do both while navigating uncertainty, variability, and high stakes.

But there is another layer that I found particularly fascinating when I entered design school from an engineering background: the role of trends.

At BraidBloom, we help organizations navigate complex challenges through human-centered design.

The perspectives shared in this series are based on my professional experience across engineering, design, and healthcare. They represent my personal perspective and are intended to spark conversation and exploration.