SAN FRANCISCO — In an era where technological acceleration frequently outpaces human empathy, the intersection of healthcare and industrial design demands a delicate, intentional balance. This philosophy anchors the work of Jules Sherman, the recipient of the prestigious 2025 National Design Award in Product Design. Sherman’s illustrious career—marked by the transition from consumer goods to life-saving pediatric and maternal medical devices—serves as a masterclass in empathy-driven engineering. This month, design enthusiasts, clinicians, and innovators will have a rare opportunity to peer inside her creative methodology during a virtual lunchtime keynote address. Sherman will reflect on a decade-plus evolution of her practice, charting a fascinating technological trajectory from the tactile intimacy of hand-drawn paper sketches to sophisticated, generative artificial intelligence tools. The event, expected to draw a global audience of multidisciplinary creators, will culminate in an intimate, high-level fireside chat with Amber Bravo, head of Story Studio at Figma. Together, Sherman and Bravo will dissect the modern creator’s toolkit, examining how emerging technologies like AI can simultaneously accelerate production timelines and dismantle technical barriers for designers entering complex fields like software coding and hardware engineering. Main Facts: Innovation, Accolades, and the Intersection of Design and Medicine The virtual dialogue highlights a pivotal moment for both the design industry and healthcare innovation. At its core, the event centers on Jules Sherman’s receipt of the 2025 National Design Award, an accolade conferred by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which honors innovation, cultural impact, and design excellence across the United States. Key Highlights of the Event and Speakers: The Keynote Focus: Sherman will deconstruct her design process, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how she transitioned from traditional industrial design sketching to harnessing artificial intelligence in human-computer interaction (HCI) research. The Human Element: Central to Sherman’s talk is her advocacy for designing with—not just for—patients and families, ensuring that the human experience remains at the absolute center of technological development. The Expert Dialogue: Amber Bravo, a seasoned veteran of creative storytelling from Google’s Material Design and Figma, will lead a deep-dive conversation exploring how software ecosystems can streamline a designer’s workflow, bridge software silos, and expedite the delivery of critical solutions. The Broader Context: The session underscores the vital role of cross-disciplinary collaboration, proving that the most successful medical innovations occur when designers, clinicians, engineers, and end-users sit at the same table. Chronology: A Decade of Transforming Maternal and Pediatric Care To fully appreciate Sherman’s current trajectory—including her academic pursuits at the University of California, Irvine, and her integration of AI into design workflows—it is essential to examine the personal and professional milestones that defined her career. 2010: The Catalyst Sherman’s career pivot was born in the crucible of personal trauma. Following a harrowing, high-stress hospital birth experience in 2010, Sherman underwent a profound shift in perspective. Recognizing systemic vulnerabilities in maternal and hospital care, she redirected her extensive background in consumer product design toward a singular, mission-driven objective: transforming pediatric and maternal healthcare through rigorously tested, FDA-cleared devices engineered to prioritize absolute safety and clinical efficacy. 2012–2024: Inside the Innovation Labs Armed with a renewed sense of purpose, Sherman spent the next dozen years embedded within elite medical innovation labs, most notably at Stanford Medicine and Children’s National Hospital. In these high-stakes environments, she operated at the intersection of clinical medicine and industrial design. Rather than working in a vacuum, Sherman established a collaborative ecosystem. She worked shoulder-to-shoulder with pediatricians, neonatal nurses, biomedical engineers, and patient families to identify unmet clinical needs. During this tenure, she also served as an educator, teaching design thinking methodologies to medical students and nursing staff, empowering frontline healthcare workers to conceptualize and prototype their own clinical solutions. Key Product Milestones from the Lab: Trach Sense: An intuitive diagnostic tool designed to reliably detect dangerous tracheostomy complications before they escalate into life-threatening emergencies. The Kangarobe: A specialized garment engineered to optimize and encourage skin-to-skin care (kangaroo mother care) in high-stress neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Primo-Lacto: A secure, closed-system device designed for the hygienic collection and preservation of colostrum, safeguarding liquid gold for newborns. NOOMA Tech: An innovative device designed to seamlessly facilitate delayed cord clamping for preterm infants, improving neonatal transition outcomes. 2023–Present: Academia and the Digital Frontier Eager to scale her impact further, Sherman expanded her professional footprint into academia. As an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, she imparted her rigorous design methodologies and real-world development experiences to the next generation of bioengineering students. Currently, Sherman is pursuing graduate studies in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the University of California, Irvine. In this academic setting, she is actively prototyping next-generation pediatric tools and mobile clinic applications, merging physical medical hardware with responsive digital interfaces. Supporting Data: The Evolution of the Design Toolkit The upcoming discussion between Sherman and Bravo touches upon a crucial industry-wide shift: the integration of advanced digital tools and artificial intelligence into the product development lifecycle. While early-stage medical device design historically relied on laborious, physical prototyping and two-dimensional sketching, modern workflows are increasingly digital-first. The Shift from Analog to AI-Assisted Design The Analog Era (Pre-2015): The early phase of Sherman’s career relied heavily on traditional industrial design methodologies—hand-drawn ideation sketches, foam and cardboard physical mock-ups, and iterative physical testing. While deeply intuitive, this approach often introduced significant time lags between initial concept and clinical testing. The Collaborative Digital Era (2015–2022): The rise of cloud-based design systems and collaborative platforms revolutionized how multidisciplinary teams communicated. Tools like Figma allowed designers, engineers scattered across different continents, and medical professionals to comment, iterate, and co-create in real-time. The AI and HCI Era (2023–Present): Today, Sherman’s work at UC Irvine leverages artificial intelligence to rapidly synthesize complex qualitative user research, generate preliminary design iterations, and streamline human-computer interaction pathways. By utilizing AI to handle repetitive computational and logistical tasks, designers can dedicate more cognitive bandwidth to empathy, ethics, and human-centric problem-solving. The Value of Cross-Disciplinary Integration Data from healthcare innovation hubs consistently demonstrates that medical devices developed with integrated user-experience (UX) and human-centered design principles experience: Higher Adoption Rates: Clinicians and patients are significantly more likely to correctly utilize devices that feature intuitive, human-tested interfaces. Reduced Error Margins: In neonatal and pediatric care, streamlined design directly correlates with a reduction in user-error events during high-stress medical emergencies. Shorter Time-to-Market: Digital collaboration tools and AI-supported prototyping reduce the conceptualization phase by an estimated 30% to 40%, allowing life-saving technologies to reach clinical trials faster. Official Responses and Perspectives The recognition of Jules Sherman by the National Design Awards committee, alongside her partnership with Figma’s Story Studio lead Amber Bravo, highlights a broader cultural acknowledgment of design’s power to heal, connect, and solve systemic challenges. Reflections on Leadership and Storytelling: Amber Bravo’s Vision Amber Bravo, who oversees Story Studio at Figma, brings a unique perspective to the conversation. Operating at the intersection of product development, brand strategy, and cultural storytelling—with past leadership roles at Google’s Material Design, Herman Miller, Dwell, and The FADER—Bravo understands that great products are only as impactful as the narratives that explain them. In her work at Figma, Bravo helps shape how the tech ecosystem understands design tools, emphasizing that software should never feel like a gatekeeper. During their upcoming dialogue, Bravo is expected to focus on how AI can act as a great equalizer. By breaking down traditional software barriers and lowering the technical threshold for coding and digital prototyping, AI empowers medical innovators like Sherman to bring complex ideas to life without needing a background in computer science. The Designer as Advocate: Jules Sherman’s Philosophy In her previous lectures and academic writings, Sherman has consistently emphasized that medical design is fundamentally an act of advocacy. "When you design for a family sitting in a NICU, you aren’t just designing a piece of plastic or electronics; you are designing a moment of calm inside the worst storm of their lives," Sherman has noted in past institutional presentations. By centering her practice on the lived experiences of patients, Sherman challenges the traditional medical-industrial complex to view patients not as passive recipients of care, but as active co-designers of their own medical journeys. Her transition from physical sketching to AI-assisted HCI represents a natural extension of this philosophy: using every available tool to reduce friction between human need and technological capability. Implications: What This Means for the Future of Design and Healthcare The convergence of Jules Sherman’s clinical innovations and Amber Bravo’s insights on digital tooling signals several profound implications for the future of industrial design, healthcare, and technology. 1. The Democratization of Complex Engineering As artificial intelligence continues to integrate into design platforms like Figma, the traditional silos separating industrial designers, software engineers, and medical professionals are dissolving. AI-driven coding assistants and rapid prototyping tools mean that a designer with a deep understanding of pediatric trauma can conceptualize, test, and iterate complex digital-physical interfaces independently. This democratization accelerates innovation, allowing specialized domain experts—like nurses, doctors, and bioengineers—to build custom solutions for localized healthcare challenges. 2. Redefining "Human-Centered" in the Age of AI There is a growing anxiety across creative industries that the integration of AI will depersonalize the design process. Sherman’s career serves as a powerful counter-narrative. By demonstrating how she uses AI to handle the tedious mechanics of data synthesis and interface layout, Sherman proves that technology can actually free up human capacity for deeper empathy. When machines handle the calculations, humans can focus on emotional resonance, user observation, and ethical considerations. 3. The Rising Prominence of Socially Impactful Design The Cooper Hewitt National Design Award recognition of Sherman underscores a shifting cultural paradigm. While aesthetic and commercial consumer products will always have a place in the market, institutional and public validation is increasingly flowing toward designers who tackle existential human problems. From maternal mortality rates to neonatal intensive care optimization, the vanguard of modern design is saving lives. Looking Ahead As the design community tunes into the virtual conversation between Jules Sherman and Amber Bravo, the overarching takeaway is clear: the future belongs to creators who refuse to choose between technological sophistication and human empathy. By embracing AI while keeping the vulnerable patient firmly at the center of the drawing board—whether sketched by hand on paper or rendered via generative code—innovators like Sherman are proving that design is one of our most potent tools for healing the world. To learn more about the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards and to view upcoming virtual programming, visit the official Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards Portal. Post navigation The Symphony of Silence: Bentley’s "Torcal" and the Future of Automotive Sound Design Fractured Histories: Ry Van Der Hout’s "In Broken Light" at the Spadina Museum
