For the 2.3 million people in the UK living with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) - and millions...

A New Way Forward in Health and Care
Most health and care innovation starts with problems to solve, needs to meet, or outcomes to achieve.
At Umio, Design with Real Lived Experience (RLX) begins with what people truly live - day by day, moment to moment.
Creating value that’s not just measurable, but meaningful, real, lived and felt by everyone it touches.
Why this matters
Introduction to Design with Real Lived Experience
Perceive what is actually happening - in bodies, relationships, settings, and systems - beyond the lens of behaviour, outcome, or diagnosis.
Learn from the ground of real experience by attuning to the affective, spatial, and relational dynamics that shape how people live, cope, and endure.
Design WITH, not for, by creating technologies, services, environments, and supports that emerge from within the lived conditions themselves.
Co-compose meaningful care, connection, and change alongside those experiencing constraint. These are not solutions delivered, but shared possibilities made real.
Enact system transformation that is attuned, relational, and grounded in the full complexity of health, care, and life.
Bergson is our transformative agent 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.
Bergson is available on a request and managed access basis with Umio support.
Our Services
We offer bespoke services, research, and educational programs that help enterprises, teams, and communities design with the real, lived dynamics of health, illness, and human transformation.
All services are grounded in the principles of Design with RLX - a methodology that perceives health not as a fixed category, but as a relational, unfolding process of real lived experience.
Seeking new paths to health design, value and impact? Umio is for ...
Health and Care Enterprises
Clinicians, Therapists, Counsellors
Public Health Creators
Community Leaders
Architects and Urban Designers
What if pain wasn’t something to manage, but something to move with?
This case study shares the story of how we created Ooex, a first-of-its-kind platform co-composed with UK Armed Forces veterans living with chronic pain. Instead of asking veterans to fit into health systems, we built a system that fits into their lives. The result? A dynamic, peer-powered, real experience platform that senses, supports, and amplifies healing from within.
Explore how Design with Real Lived Experience (RLX) offers a transformative approach to chronic pain, moving beyond clinical care to relational support, perception, and participation in everyday life.
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."