While trying to develop a low-cost syringe for the developing world context, you (the designer) hit a cross-roads. Constructing the syringe to auto-disable after a single use, an important safety feature, significantly adds to the cost of the design – making it potentially unaffordable for some hospitals and clinics. However, if you don’t add the safety feature, you are enabling the potential for the spread of disease. How do you as a designer proceed?

1. Determine the facts in the situation
   • The goal of our task is to develop an inexpensive syringe for the developing world. The feature we are trying to add on is for the syringe to auto-disable after a single use, but when we add on this feature it makes it expensive and unrealistic for some hospitals and clinics to be able to afford the syringe. This add on feature reduces the potential to spread the disease
2. Define the Stakeholders
   • Hospitals and clinics: They will purchase and use the product
   • Patients: They will be the ones who are receiving the product and its consequences
   • Designers: The people who design the product and its features
   • Manufacturer: The company who makes the product and distributes it to hospitals and clinics
3. Assess the motivations of the Stakeholders
   • Hospitals and clinics: They want patients to be reassured that the product is safe and want the product to be affordable to purchase it to use with patients
   • Patients: They want to be reassured that the product they are using is safe and of good quality
   • Designers: Their reputation for future sales is affected by the design and quality of the product
   • Manufacturer: Their reputation for future distribution is also affected by how the product is perceived by the community receiving it
4. Formulate (at least three) alternative solutions
   • Solution 1: Design the product with the safety feature and increase the price
     • The product with the safety feature will be more reassuring to patients, because they will be more appealed towards going to hospitals that offer this syringe for use. However, the population that benefits from the syringe’s safety features will be higher class because they will be going to hospitals and clinics that offer more expensive services. These hospitals will need to have a flexible budget and a lot of funds to purchase these syringes for use. So even though there will be higher demand to use the syringe among higher economic class patients, most patients who might need it in the developing world will not have access to the product at all.
   • Solution 2: Design the product without the safety feature to make it more affordable
     • The product without the safety feature will be less reassuring to patients, but this hesitation could disappear because of the demand to use the syringe for health reasons. Patients who have more money may not use this product, but in the developing world making the product more affordable is key to have the majority of the population use it
   • Solution 3: Redesign the product completely to find a way to make the product safer without having to increase the price
     • The product can be redesigned to integrate a new safety feature with a new design, but this might be more expensive for the people investing in paying designers to spend more time redesigning the product. Additionally, the designers most likely already considered many materials and designs for the syringe, so the product might not be as different and the price might not change as much anyway, which would not be time efficient
5. Seek additional assistance, as appropriate
   • To use the product without the safety feature, it would be useful to have a company to help teach the hospital on how to use the product to lower the risk of spreading the disease
6. Select the best course of action
   • The best course of action is to use the syringe without the safety feature because there are precautions that can be taught to lower the risk of spreading diseases. If the product is affordable, it will generate more demand from hospitals of all budgets to purchase the product, and increase its use among patients. However, the inexpensive cost of the syringe comes with other consequences.
   • Without this safety feature, there is a higher risk that patients who use the syringe will reuse it. Reusing the syringe is appealing because it would increase the value and use of the syringe, which could spread the disease more. To prevent reuse of the syringe, doctors face the challenge of having to monitor the syringe use more carefully. Although this monitoring does not come at a cost, it uses more time that doctors might not have with so many patients.
7. What are the implications of your solution on the venture?
   • Economic: More hospitals and doctors will be able to purchase the syringe, which will allow more patients who need it to be able to access it due to its less expensive cost
   • Social: Because this syringe does not have a safety feature, it may lead to the disease spreading more among the patient’s community
   • Economic: There will be a higher demand for the syringe because more hospitals will be able to afford it, thus increasing the profit for manufacturers of the syringe since they will have more sales