Lekshmy Parameswaran

Lekshmy Parameswaran is a designer who has been working in the area of health and care for almost two decades. In 2008, together with László Herczegh, she co-founded fuelfor, a specialist design consultancy working with a wide variety of international players within the health and care sector.

In 2017 they co-founded The Care Lab, a collaborative platform that uses human-centred design practices to rethink and redesign care models and solutions for our societies and care systems. Their vision of care is an equitable, proactive and compassionate experience that is widely accessible. It also forms an integral part of everyday life, from birth to death.

She holds a Master’s degree in Engineering from Cambridge University and a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art in London.

Designing Care, From Birth to the End-of-Life
None of us wants to think about getting old. Why is that?
What are our perceptions of old age and the end of life?
Do we even dare to ask these questions?

Ageing populations are seen as a formidable challenge for most societies around the world. The economic, socio-cultural, clinical and ethical aspects are closely intertwined and complex. Our health and care systems cannot cope with the burden of this problem. Current solutions and systems are not systemic, sustainable or scaleable enough to meet the challenge.
We need to rethink our approach to the problem of ageing…

We believe that Design can contribute to a new strategy in 3 key ways:
– to build empathy
– to co-design with different people involved
– to articulate new possibilities through designed solutions and strategies

Lekshmy will share The Care Lab´s collaborative design approach to reframe and reimagine the experience of ageing in our societies, using implemented project examples from around the world to illustrate the impact and effectiveness of Design as a transformative practice.