Infrastructuring Transdisciplinary Problem Solving in Translational Research

Translational Research in the health sciences endeavors to bring biomedical discoveries into clinical applications that improve human health. This work is complex and long-term with a substantial risk of failure. A key step of clinical trials is needed to evaluate the effects of those interventions on human biomedical or behavioral outcomes. Timely recruitment of human subjects and meeting recruitment milestones is recognized as one of the most significant contributors to delays and failures. Quality and Design approaches have been tried to address the problem but the scope has been limited. We proposed to determine how Quality and Design may lead to complementary solutions for these barriers of Translational Research. The first ten studios using this approach are presented here. Three themes emerged: (1) problems were investigated similarly but there was a difference in insights, (2) quality process-based solutions tended to be specific to the issue discussed whereas the design process often yielded solutions broader or even tangential, and (3) quality solutions demonstrated more immediacy while design solutions showed more systemic ideas. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates how Design and Quality in a transdisciplinary studio may lead to solutions with different characteristics for clinical trials and advance translational science.