InterviewInterview With Lee McCormack, CEO at MyGlobalHome

Recipe Design, a meaning centred design and innovation consultancy, and MyGlobalHome, a group of experts shaping the future of living, have announced a new partnership centred around creation and deployment of future-facing digital health solutions. To learn more, we conducted an interview with Lee McCormack, CEO at MyGlobalHome.

1. Can you tell us more about Recipe Design?

Recipe Design is a design and innovation consultancy with a concentrated focus on defining and delivering meaning in their design work, which is what attracted us to them. Having worked at the intersection between health and home for so many years, Recipe Design is uniquely positioned to help us create a digital health ecosystem which prioritises the user’s experience and needs as they evolve over time.

Recipe’s experience of designing coherent and consistent digital solutions will be an invaluable asset as we realise our vision of homes looking after occupants, not the other way around.

2. Can you tell us more about MyGlobalHome?

MyGlobalHome is a group of experts shaping the future of living. Together, we are tackling a wide range of issues facing the sector – from carbon neutral construction to facilitating better healthcare in the home – all with the aim of empowering the end home user.

Whether it be developers, buyers, brands or researchers, we’re connecting industry stakeholders with leading innovators and bespoke resources to promote a better future of living. We’ve been funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and are fully aligned with the governmental pledge for carbon neutrality by 2050.

3. What does it mean to adapt to digital health for the home and, vice versa?

Central to this is a focus on user experience, and a desire to optimise how consumers understand and interact with digital health tools within a broader ecosystem. Integrating technology into the built environment is important as it enables us to gather diverse datasets within a singular ecosystem. This means we can better contextualise digital health insights and therefore deliver greater value for the end user.

4. How does Recipe Design help different sectors adapt to digital health for the home

Recipe’s Meaning Centred Design toolkit is key here. Their approach seeks to understand why things are perceived and valued in certain ways and uses the resultant insights to drive meaningful focus across the design process. Since MyGlobalHome has user experience as a core focus of our offering, we consider this approach to be highly beneficial in delivering the highest quality service possible.

5. What kind of sectors does Recipe Design work with?

Although the company worked across a number of sectors, Recipe Design is renowned for its work within healthcare and the home environment. The agency’s  extensive experience across these spaces is exciting for us as we look to find our place in each and understand what the convergence between them unlocks for our business over time.

6. Why did Recipe Design partner with MyGlobalHome?

Recipe Design has over 30 years’ experience in healthcare, with a particular specialism in the intersection of health and home – two previously very different sectors – so it felt like a natural fit to help us unlock new possibilities in our proposition.

We’re hopeful that by drawing on Recipe Design’s expertise, and leveraging its Meaning Centred Design process, our collaboration will explore how the meaningful deployment of technology can fast track our progress in home digital health innovation.

7. What features would each organization provide the other with?

As mentioned, Recipe Design offers us a rich understanding of the intersection between healthcare and the home as well as a deep strategic insight in the space. In turn, MyGlobalHome offers an innovation opportunity which strongly aligns with Recipe Design’s beliefs around the future of digital healthcare within the built environment.

8. How do you visualize the future home, and how does this partnership help in realizing such a home?

The future home should look after us, rather than the other way around. Technological integration will be how this is achieved and the shift towards smart homes is becoming apparent however what we’re seeing is a slower uptake than expected despite this growing demand. We believe our partnership with Recipe Design will enable us to overcome the challenges smart home and digital health developers are currently experiencing which include costly implementation and complexity in design and usability issues.

We’ve both recognised the opportunity is there for a robust, cost effective solution that is integrated into the core fabric of the home, offering a truly integrated and stable user experience and not reliant on cloud-to-cloud integration of multiple health tech devices.

9. What would make the solution developed by Recipe Design and MyGlobalHome stand out from similar solutions?

What we’re currently seeing with smart home and digital health solutions is that too often they’re simply a collection of gadgets. Most solutions focus on controlling a specific isolated application from a smart device, but we see an opportunity to drive real meaning through an integrated smart home and digital health technology ecosystem. Real meaning to us means providing a centralised and user-friendly platform focused on data driven health solutions.

10. Where do you see your new solution in the next 5 years?

We want as many people as possible to benefit from our home digital health solutions. Our initial focus is on incorporating our technology into new builds but within 12 months we aim to be in a position where we can retrofit existing homes as well. Within five years we see our solution leading the way in the significant shift towards digital solutions that the healthcare sector is currently experiencing. We absolutely believe that our innovations will become commonplace in the home of the future.