Medicare was created to serve all Canadians. This fact also makes the design of healthcare products and services challenging because the user base is hugely diverse. In our quest for universality, it might be appealing to target our designs at mainstream users first, and then make adjustments to accommodate the needs of users who we might consider to be “outliers”. But there’s a different approach, one that does the complete opposite, that promises to be more effective at coming up with breakthrough products and services. This approach targets not the majority but the fringe users first, under the theory that users with exceptional needs provide the best ideas, and that products and services developed to meet these needs could, in time, also appeal to mainstream users. Through a careful review of the literature and the application of these concepts to the student’s own work, this paper explores the roles of outliers in the design of healthcare products and services. It makes the distinction between those with design agency(ability to design their own solutions) and those without, and proposes a framework, design by exception, in which outliers are sought after, rather than accommodated, in healthcare design projects.

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