Chris Lawer’s paper "The Creation of Concrete Real Experience" investigates the process by which...

See health differently. Design with what's really happening.
Most models of health start with conditions, symptoms, behaviours, or outcomes.
Umio Design for Real Lived Experience (RLX) begins somewhere else: with the felt, relational, and unfolding reality of life as it is lived.
We don’t reduce people to diagnoses, data points, or demographic types.
We work with the full depth of human experience - including pain, joy, transition, care, constraint, and transformation.
Grounded in lived expertise and relational philosophy, Design for RLX is a method and mindset for uncovering the real content and nature of experience - across body, mind, environment, memory, relation, and material life.
Whether you’re designing for chronic illness, mental health, public systems, technologies, or care innovation, Design for RLX helps you perceive what’s really there - and help change it.
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Bergson is our transformative app that provides unparalleled deep insight into the real lived experience of any health condition, illness, or disability, anywhere in the world.
it empowers you to uncover the dynamic, interconnected feelings, factors and forces that shape human lives and health - giving you deep insights and a novel means to inspire change, design with purpose, and create real impact.
Our radical thinking and methods deploy a breakthrough perspective on lived experience, challenge status quo thinking, capture original insights, and facilitate impactful learning, design and value-creation ... in any applied health or wider experience context ... anywhere.
Umio founder Chris Lawer's book, "Interactional Creation of Health: Experience Ecosystem Ontology, Task and Method," introduces our comprehensive framework for understanding and improving health through an experience-centred ecosystem approach. Written during lockdown, Chris proposes a shift from traditional health models to a more integrated and whole view, focusing on the dynamic interactions within various domains of lived or real experience. Here are the key aspects of the book and Umio framework:
Health Ecosystem Value Design (HEVD) Framework: Lawer presents a revised version of his HEVD framework, which is built on seven foundational principles. These foundations help in understanding the complex flows and forces that shape experiences of health, disease, and illness over time.
Four Interactional Domains: The model identifies four primary domains: bodily-motor, perceptual-cognitive, social-cultural, and material-spatial. Each domain includes various entities and mechanisms that interact to form lived health experiences. This approach emphasizes the interconnectedness of different factors influencing health.
Twelve-Step Method: The book provides a structured method for practitioners to analyze and improve health experiences. This method includes detailed templates and guidelines for conducting inquiries and implementing actions within health experience ecosystems. The aim is to enhance capacities in health systems for achieving valuable developmental impacts.
Action Spaces: Lawer outlines the concept of "action spaces" which are strategic areas for intervention. These spaces focus on addressing the origins of health issues, changing perceptions and beliefs, determining differences in lived experiences, and designing multi-dimensional strategies to create desired health outcomes. This involves integrating traditional and non-traditional actors and leveraging various technologies and services.
Holistic and Unified Model: The book advocates for a model that encompasses all aspects of health experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding how different elements interact to form and sustain health over time. This holistic view aims to reveal hidden possibilities for creating health and preventing or recovering from disease.
Overall, "Interactional Creation of Health" aims to provide a new paradigm for health systems, encouraging a more dynamic and interconnected approach to health that can better address the complexities of lived experiences. This framework is designed to be applicable across various contexts, from individual health experiences to broader community and population health initiatives.
This major report presents Umio’s concepts and qualitative research into UK armed forces veteran experiences with chronic pain. It is one deliverable from our 12-month project with the UK Office for Veterans’ Affairs (OVA).
Despite almost universal agreement on the importance of addressing the social determinants of health, the dominant logic and frameworks for doing so suffer from some important limitations. In this paper, we offer a critique and alternative.
In this paper, we explain the nature, formation, and differentiation of concrete real experience. It defines affect and how it differs from emotion, and explains a process for how real lived experiences form, differ and persist.
Explore our acclaimed Health Ecosystem Value Design® framework applied to a health and/or social context or contexts of your choice. Share any relevant documentation before the consultation, then obtain a tailored briefing of how your enterprise can drive all-win-more value and impacts, centred on our radical new framing and models of real lived experience and health/care ecosystems. After the consultation, obtain a one-page written summary of how to begin realising the possibilities we explored. Total consultation time of 2 hours.
"Umio’s re-conception of experience and value provides the breakthrough thinking that healthcare and related systems need to repurpose resources and transform delivery."
"The Umio framework is comprehensive and just what we need to help deal with the complexities of health as we learn to value differences and activate capacities."
"Masterful .. outstanding .. detailed what and how framework for embracing a dynamic creational .. view based on whole lived experiences."