These Future Doctors Are Learning How to Influence Urban Design
Dr. Bon Ku, like many Americans, grew up without health insurance. The son of Korean immigrants who bounced from Chicago to Houston before landing in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he spent his adolescence working in his family’s restaurant, bussing tables and washing dishes alongside undocumented workers. Like him, they were living on a knife’s edge, hoping to not get injured or sick.
It was this experience that led Dr. Ku, decades later, to the emergency room. “My experience of not having health care and just being really poor, working with illegal aliens in the restaurant in the basement in Newark, New Jersey, in a kitchen,” he says, “that’s one of the reasons why I went into emergency medicine — it’s really developing empathy for the marginalized or the vulnerable in our society.”
Growing up in this environment, where the abstraction of health care meets the cold reality of urban life, is what led Ku to develop a more city-focused view of medicine than most ER physicians. Between pulling night shifts at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and teaching at their medical school, he co-founded JeffDESIGN, a hybrid university program that combines medical training with design classes. Ku, who sports clear-framed glasses and slicked-back hair, transitions seamlessly from scrubs to chambray button-downs. If you saw him on campus, you’d think he was, well, a design professor.
Studying through JeffDESIGN is like majoring in medicine and minoring in design. Launched in February 2015, the program focuses on a broad range of design applications aimed at impacting real people’s health, from 3D printing that will help improve surgery to redesigning the physical space of hospitals. Most importantly, it’s about exploring the ways infrastructure, community and the built environment can have a positive impact on health.
“One of our mission statements is, how do we design healthier cities?” Ku says. “And how do we humanize the data around that? Some people argue that’s not the health system’s job, that’s a public sector job. Because if you fix economic disparity and the quality of education and food, that’s going to improve health, totally. How can I, as a physician who deals with the complications of diseases, make an impact on that? I want caring about these disparities and social injustices to be in the DNA of physicians.”
Ku originally majored in classical studies at Penn, trying to, as he explained it, resist his parent’s Asian-immigrant dream of having their American-born son go to an Ivy League school and become a physician. But his literary fantasies quickly faded.
“I was like, ‘I’m never going to make a living doing this,’” he laughs. “Then I found the ER is a great way to be able to serve these populations that I was interested in working with.” He went to med school at Penn State and did his training primarily in urban emergency rooms before moving back to Philly and starting his career in the ER.
But the health care system’s failure to adequately serve the many low-income patients he treated in Philadelphia left Ku disillusioned. He wondered, how could he make a bigger contribution to public health? He took a year off and went to public policy school at Princeton, where he toyed with the idea of someday going into politics. However, his time away from Philadelphia ultimately reinvigorated his love for the emergency room and changed his view of the impact a physician could have — not just on patients, but on the places they lived.
“I’ve always felt like the creative part of my brain has been trapped, and a lot of these kids feel that way,” he explains. “Because I think we could do more. And so having something as loose as design allowed me that canvas to be able to go, ‘Okay, we get to work on all types of design,’ whether it’s working with architects and thinking about design of the built environment to designing medical devices. Looking at it from that sort of lens and mindset opened up huge opportunities for us.”
A couple of years after he returned to Philadelphia, Ku helped cofound JeffDESIGN as the first-of-its-kind design track within a medical school. The medical school’s dean, Dr. Mark L. Tykocinski, mentioned to Ku he had a vision of medicine intersecting with fields outside of standard medical school study, like humanities or computational engineering. They settled on a co-curricular design program within the medical school and JeffDESIGN was born. Its goal was to design healthier cities, find more efficient ways to deliver care and develop the next generation of medical devices. It’s not a bunch of heady undergrads touting the beauty of Copenhagen’s streetscapes — it’s a program that aims to arm a new crop of doctors with a modern set of tools to address public health through design.
RETHINKING THE PLAYGROUND
Deep beneath Philadelphia’s old Federal Reserve building in Center City, in a steel-encased former bank vault, JeffDESIGN students have been working at the intersection of medicine and design since November 2016. They spend their days 3D-printing models of jaws, mapping inefficiencies in hospital layouts and studying how to redesign urban spaces for public health. The 4,000-square-foot laboratory space is simply called The Vault. When I was there on a Friday morning late last year, Ku and I lounged on a couch in the back corner while students tinkered with 3D printers and teased Ku that they know more about The Vault’s technology than he does. Photos and mockups of various projects were plastered on walls and easels throughout the space.
One of those projects, smarterPLAY — they have a penchant for ALL CAPS — explored the way children play in parks, playgrounds and other public spaces. Last summer, JeffDESIGN researchers slapped sensors on groups of kids across Philadelphia and monitored them in a variety of locations, from the Waterloo Playground to the Whitman Branch of the Free Library. The goal was to see how exactly they used the spaces in an effort to understand how they might be redesigned to attract more people.
The data from smarterPLAY, as Next City reported in an op-ed last fall, “resulted in hundreds of hours of quantitative data about the physical activity and location of users, both indoors and out. The data is anonymous and helps create an accurate picture, down to a few centimeters, of where people go, how much time they spend there, how active they are and what interactions they have with equipment, site features or other people.”