Millions of Americans in rural communities live hours from a hospital.
10XBeta and Other Tomorrows set out to close that distance, building electric vehicles that carry hospital-grade treatment directly into remote towns for ARPA-H’s PARADIGM (Platform Accelerating Rural Access to Distributed & Integrated Medical Care).
THE BRIEF WASN’T JUST ABOUT SPACE
The obvious challenge was technical: fit hospital-grade care into a vehicle.
But the harder question was human: what does it actually feel like to receive care in a van?
We needed that answer early, before a single fixture was committed to.
THE STUDY: USING THE MOCKUP AS A PROBE
As a design strategist at Other Tomorrows, the project's lead research partner, I co-designed and co-facilitated role-play sessions with the clinicians and experts who'd work inside these vehicles.
Rather than ask what they thought they'd need, we put them inside a full-scale van mockup and had them spatially enact two real procedures: a daily routine and a high-difficulty edge case built to push the space to its limits.
The mockup made the constraints tangible enough that clinicians stopped theorising and started solving out loud, which was exactly the behaviour we needed to observe.
WHAT SURFACED
The clinicians weren’t preoccupied with their own workflows. They adapted, improvised, made their equipment work in the small space.
What they returned to, again and again, was the patient they were treating and the patient’s sense of safety, their need to not feel exposed, their state of mind walking in.
“The other thing is lowering that White Coat Syndrome… the emotional state of these patients is often compromised.”
Kinesiology MD, Homeward Health
These clinicians understood that a calmer patient is an easier patient to treat and that emotional state and clinical outcome aren’t separate problems.
WHAT IT CHANGED
This reframed the problem for 10XBeta. The van wasn’t a space-optimisation exercise; it was an environment that had to lower anxiety and protect the patient before it did anything else, with the clinical equipment built around that need, not ahead of it.
Because this surfaced through enacted behaviour rather than a survey, the team could trust it, and design for the patient’s experience from day one instead of retrofitting it later.
PROJECT TEAM
Other Tomorrows: Hannah Oh, Kyle Wing, Lee Moreau, María Risueño
10XBeta: Carly Smith, Christopher St. John, Edward Jacobs, Emmanuel Wasson, Frederick Kruger, Jolie Lerner, Marcel Botha, Matthew Gómez, Ria John
