Session Design Submission Review

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Surgical education is undergoing rapid transformation, driven by advances in pedagogy and technology. However, much of education research continues to emphasize interventions (e.g., curriculum, technology) without fully accounting for the complex and evolving needs of users (e.g., learners, educators) and the broader educational ecosystem.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) offers a rigorous, user-centered methodology that complements traditional approaches by prioritizing usability, accessibility, and stakeholder engagement. Grounded in the four core principles of empathy, iteration, collaboration, and accessibility, HCD employs empathetic inquiry and iterative co-design to uncover unmet needs, generate contextually relevant solutions, and improve implementation fidelity. Its central premise is to approach problem-solving by deeply understanding the experiences and challenges of all users within the system.

HCD has gained increasing traction in healthcare innovation over the past decade, demonstrating its value in improving user experience, intervention effectiveness, and adoption. Within surgical education, HCD provides a particularly powerful framework for curriculum development and technology integration. By identifying unmet educational needs, accommodating diverse learning styles and abilities, accounting for issues of access and accessibility, and fostering engagement across stakeholders, HCD is a powerful methodology to enhance both the design and delivery of surgical education for a changing world.

The HCD process includes five phases:

1) Preparation Phase: Define the design challenge by mapping the ecosystem, identifying stakeholders, and understanding user needs and context.

2) Inspiration Phase: Conduct qualitative research to uncover key themes, generate insights, and identify design opportunities.

3) Ideation Phase: Generate ideas collaboratively through brainstorming and co-design, then refine concepts through iterative prototyping and user feedback.

4) Implementation Phase: Translate refined prototypes into deployable interventions by developing scalable models, integrating with existing systems and workflows, and ensuring usability and accessibility across diverse user groups.

5) Evaluation Phase: Assess intervention and implementation effectiveness using qualitative and quantitative data.

This workshop will equip surgical educators with the tools to apply HCD to surgical education innovation with a specific focus on the Inspiration and Ideation phases. Through interactive activities and case-based learning, participants will practice user-centered approaches to framing educational challenges, conducting qualitative inquiry, synthesizing insights, and collaboratively generating solutions.

Participants will first be introduced to the HCD process, its distinguishing features, and its relevance to advancing surgical education using a case study. During the Inspiration Phase, participants will learn how to frame design challenges, collect data from key stakeholders, and ascribe contextual meaning to the data by developing “insight statements.” During the Ideation Phase, participants will learn how to adapt “insight statements” into “how might we questions,” which reframe key learnings from the Inspiration Phase into actionable design opportunities. Participants will review the rules for facilitating “Brainstorm Sessions,” which are interdisciplinary co-design workshops, then they will learn to generate creative solutions and organize these results. Finally, participants will have the opportunity to translate the outputs of the “Brainstorm Session” into prototypes, which are tangible, low-fidelity representations of solutions, and learn how to select a prototype. Upon completion, attendees will be equipped to approach surgical education challenges using a more creative, innovative, and user-centric approach.

90-minute workshop

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Develop an understanding of the Human-Centered Design methodology

Apply the Human-Centered Design process to challenges in surgical education

Use Human-Centered Design to design a prototype intervention to address a challenge in surgical education