The Shape of Drugs: a matter of Human-Centred Design

The importance of drugs in our daily activities is evident. And yet design thinking suffers from relative inertia about viewing medications as objects of use and consumption. Conventionally intended as industrial pharmaceutical products obtained based on scientific principles, drugs are both medicinal forms saturated with meaning and technical objects—for the latter, we mean the product’s tangible characteristics with which the user has to cope. Therefore, it can be assumed that any medication’s efficacy depends on its scientific principles as well as on the sophisticated, hyper-technological or—conversely—prosaic techniques of intake or delivery. An approach to drugs from a human-centred design perspective may thus be aimed at verifying possible correlations between medication shapes and the inefficiency that, as a designed artefact, the medication may produce in terms of identity, understanding, and usability.