What Pilsen Teenagers Taught Me About Wellness — and What the Technology Won't See

In 2009, I spent a year doing participatory research with teenagers in Pilsen, Chicago inside a larger research project — studying how a diabetes epidemic was reshaping, motivating and constraining wellness inside Latino families navigating the disease. The work has been the backbone of every choice I've made since. The teens were the ones who taught me what wellness actually meant.

The project was Communidad Bienestar, led by the late Dr. Judith Gregory at the Institute of Design (ID) , in partnership with Esther Sciammarella and the Chicago Hispanic Health Coalition. Dr. Gregory had secured a grant to investigate the diabetes epidemic in Chicago's Hispanic communities — I went to the Institute of Design to work with her. She was my teacher and mentor; the way I came to do this work was hers. My focus inside the project was the teenage participants.

I ran the teen workshops, alongside my talented teammates. I designed and led a community-walk photography session — the kids documented their own wellness landscape with their own cameras, and those photographs became the raw material for the workshops we then ran together. I co-designed the Health Landscape game with Gladys Rosa-Mendoza, Marco Cimatti, Pinxia Ye and Jennifer Frisbie — a board with cards that mapped what challenged, motivated, and constrained wellness for teens inside Mexican-American families navigating diabetes. The year concluded with a large interactive participatory research session that brought adults and teens into the same room.

Four things from the teen table have stayed with me.

The picture-sorting exercise that worked for the adults failed with the teens. When I asked if the video cameras recording the workshop bothered them, they all said yes, by nodding their heads and becoming quiet. They wouldn't say the words out loud. What worked was handing them cameras outside the workshop room and walking their neighborhood. They photographed the murals. They explicitly didn't photograph the graffiti. They pointed out where they ate, shopped, went to school, where their friends lived, where they caught the bus. They had clear, articulated value judgments about their own community that the adult conversations weren't capturing.

The cameras themselves were the question they couldn't answer in public.

The most significant insight: they were already caregivers. They translated for their parents back into Spanish, navigated paperwork their parents couldn't read, carried the pressure of being the most fluent member of a family that depended on them to interface with the English-speaking world. Wellness, for them, was never about themselves. It was about the people they were already taking care of.

And the word "wellness" never quite fit. The word the community used was bienestar — broader, warmer, encompassing family, dignity, presence, the quality of leisure time. Wellness reduced to physical health was something the program was trying to do. Bienestar was what the teens were navigating.

Seventeen years later, those teenagers are in their thirties. Some are raising kids of their own. Their kids will be teenagers in 2031.

That's the five-year horizon I keep thinking about.

I spent the last several years scaling the creation of a strategic foresight program at a major health insurer. We specifically looked at Wellness as a domain to monitor. Three tensions kept coming up. AI-mediated personalization will get sharper and faster, and it will keep struggling to read the cultural texture those Pilsen teens carried in their photographs — the difference between a mural and graffiti. Between translating words and translating care. Between wellness and bienestar. Wearables and biometric sensors will tell us more about bodies than any generation has measured, and they will still miss what the teens told me without words — that being recorded changes what gets shared. And precision nutrition, vertically or hydroponically farmed, AI-recommended diets will solve some access problems and create new dignity problems, because access without bienestar is compliance dressed in better packaging.

Here's the claim I keep coming back to:

The technology will tell us more about wellness than we've ever known. The Pilsen teenagers told me what it still won't see.

They knew this in 2009. They didn't have the vocabulary for it. But they pointed at it in their photographs — and in everything they chose not to photograph.

What's the wellness conversation you're trying to have right now that the technology isn't quite letting you have?

#Diabetes Research #DesignFutures #FoodAsMedicine #ParticipatoryResearch #Photovoice

💊 Is Food the Most Underutilized Prescription in Healthcare?

We talk about "Food as Medicine" as a revolution, but if it’s so effective, why isn't every doctor writing scripts for spinach yet?

The truth is, we are sitting on a massive opportunity, but the bridge between the grocery aisle and the clinic is still under construction. To move from a "good idea" to a standard of care, we have to address the elephants in the room:

1. The Data Gap 📊

We know nutrition matters, but the hard data to support specific clinical outcomes at scale is still thin. To convince payers and providers, we need more than anecdotes; we need rigorous, reproducible evidence that "food prescriptions" lower A1c and heart disease markers as reliably as statins as one example.

2. The Physician Burden 🩺

We can’t just tell doctors to "talk about food." Clinicians are already overwhelmed, many receive less than two hours of nutrition instruction, Any Food as Medicine solution must integrate into the workflow without adding ten minutes of data entry. If it’s not easy for the doctor, it won’t happen for the patient.

3. The Tech Catalyst (AI + Wearables) ⌚

This is where it gets exciting. With the explosion of AI and wearable tech, we can finally track real-time biomarkers. We are moving toward a world where your glucose monitor and your grocery app talk to each other, creating a feedback loop that was impossible five years ago.

4. The Whole Patient Journey 🛣️

Food as Medicine isn't a single "dose." It’s about the entire journey:

• Can the patient afford the food? (Access)

• Do they know how to cook it? (Education)

• Is the behavior sustainable? (Adherence)

The Bottom Line: The future of healthcare isn't just about better pills; it’s about a better system that treats the kitchen as a pharmacy and the person as an individual. But until we bridge the gap between technology, data, access, and the daily reality of the clinician, it remains a "prescription" waiting to be filled.

What do you think? Is the biggest hurdle the data, the technology, medical ecosystem, access or the human element? 👇

#FoodAsMedicine #PrecisionNutrition #AI #DesignforDignity #DignifiedFutures #HealthEquity #Wellbeing #FoodIsMedicine #FoodInterventions #FoodPrescriptions

Why Mentoring Makes You A Leader

The role of a leader in today’s workplace is multi-faceted and critical to an organization’s success, particularly when implementing new practices and approaches. Mentoring can be a valuable tool in strengthening the management abilities of the leader while helping to develop the abilities of the mentee. It allows employees to acquire the skills and business acumen for positive experiences, stronger outcomes and increased self-confidence. Yet, so many organizations still do not have robust mentorship programs in place nor do they include mentoring as part of the culture or internal processes despite its proven success in sports, academia, and coaching.

Mentoring helps develop both the leader and the organization by helping the leader identify what needs to be taught. It comes in many flavors, however benefits are numerous. They include providing a confidant for a newcomer to understand what is sometimes not obvious, explaining the prevailing culture and often unspoken rules, fostering improvement, increasing leadership abilities, confidence and strengthening of interpersonal relationships. Lastly, it shows that the company has empathy and is concerned with encouraging the growth of its employees, creating a positive workplace, enhancing retention and fostering loyalty through the bond it creates and the “goodness” it imprints. It is an invisible process, one that is ego-less, and designed strictly to help someone else grow.

In my experience as a mentor, I recently had the opportunity to work on a highly visible complex system-wide corporate project with multiple stakeholders in an organization unfamiliar with the service design methodologies we were going to use. The team was slightly uncomfortable with the process, as were the project leaders despite their excitement about trying something new. Thus, a great deal of “change management” efforts needed to be in place as well as alignment and planning time. We were also working on a tight deadline for the kick-off that had already been scheduled with a group that was used to working a certain way. Mentoring was one of the most critical components to the success of the project. My mentee and I had a baseline chemistry and great rapport. I let my mentee inside my head and shared my strategic dilemmas and concerns and gave him the task of leading the project, including these tasks:

·     Develop a detailed timeline and share it with existing leaders for buy-in prior to project start date. Communicate every potential barrier and opportunity with the leadership team

·     Schedule regular planning time with leadership team without the working team

·     Make sure the right people are at the work sessions, including the ones that would implement the solutions to gain their buy-in

·     Build relationships and partnerships with the project owners/leadership team

·     Identify the team’s learning styles and accommodate them while also helping them to prepare for the process

·     Prepare for all team sessions so you feel confident

·     Know that you have the expertise to do the job despite any messages and hesitation expressed from the leadership team

·     Utilize best practices from area of expertise (service design and design research)

·     Bring the working team along. Mentor them and provide guidance until they are comfortable and can see their success using a new mindset

And while my mentee is doing this, I will be teaching, coaching, cheerleading and always making sure the project is moving to a successful conclusion.

Top ten list for building innovation capacity in healthcare organizations

It has become more and more common for hospitals to create innovation centers or build innovation capacity. Hospitals that excel at continuously innovating over time can look very different from each other however, and many underestimate what is truly involved with achieving success. In my research and experience, there are several capabilities and strategies in common to hospitals with achieving high success to innovate:

1. Decide what type of innovation you want to pursue. Open collaboration, incremental, disruptive, etc. More disruptive innovation is needed in healthcare. You will need to build the ready strategy, resources, skills, time, training and technology to support it.

2. Create a mission, vision, and values. They will act as your north star and help others understand what you and the group are striving for and how to utilize your skills.

3. Catalytic leadership that empowers staff to solve problems that matter, as well as help to identify what the right problem to solve is.

4. Build a curious culture where staff have time to go beyond their day-to-day obligations, question assumptions, and constructively challenge each other and the status quo. Invite people into the process.

5. Hire diverse teams of different gender with varying attitudes, backgrounds, experiences and capabilities to generate breakthrough ideas.

6. Make it human. Talk to your customers. Find out what their needs and behaviors are. Customer centric is the norm now. Organizations that don’t understand their customers are in danger of getting left behind, but many healthcare leaders are so mired in operations, finances, metrics, demographics, optics, and “the way it has always been done” that they aren’t considering the human beings they are serving – whether patients or staff. This is a dangerous condition.

7.  Open doors that let information and insights flow into the organization from outside walls (including board members, beneficiaries and partnerships) and across the organization itself. Consider hiring an advisory board of outside experts to help your innovation center be cutting edge and not become too insular.

8. Provide idea pathways that provide structure and processes for identifying, testing, and transforming potential concepts into needle-moving solutions. Don’t pass the concept or prototype off to developers or operations to implement without your involvement, as the concept might lose the connection to customers needs. This also helps innovation stay front and center in the organization.

9. Be transparent. There’s a myth that it's better not to talk about things or to share information. This is simply not true. It leads to silos and a lack of collaboration. Transparency can lead to loyalty, increased knowledge and richer ideas.

10. Be disciplined. Innovation isn’t about sitting around eating m&ms, playing foosball, throwing darts, and just coming up with ideas. Anyone can come up with an idea. Innovation itself and the front end processes require tremendous discipline, rigor and iteration.