Medicines as designed objects

A large amount of healthcare studies are paying very large attention to patients’ behaviour with medicines and to patient-related factors leading to successful or poor medication adherence. Despite that, more diffused design-oriented perspectives grafted onto the medication-user relation still deserve attention. Although medicines can be the first (and sometimes unique) remedy a patient can rely on when at home, there is a relative inertia in designerly ways of conceiving medicines as ‘designed things’. The diffusion and ubiquity of pharmacological treatments— specifically their pervasiveness—which today represents a nearly complete reality for many countries with mature economies, are in fact still characterized by the lack of an advanced design-oriented perspective about medications, patients, and their interactions: drugs, despite scientific refinement of its pharmacological principle, may remain quite traditional as technical objects. The opportunities offered by healthcare service systems and enabling technologies, as well as the monitoring of therapies, risk not obtaining their desired effectiveness if there is no intervention at the ground zero of the drug’s ‘shape’ itself, as it appears in its commodity elements (galenical forms; delivery, dosage and storage co-products; packaging and informative attachments); if it is neglected to investigate patients’ everyday lives, their fragility, and the nature of the user interactions, which are not scientific, but instead inaccurate and approximate; if the prosaic side of the therapeutic action is believed to be irrelevant.