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Design with Real Lived Experience

See What’s Real. Create What Matters.

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Most health and care innovation and change still starts with targets, problems, or outcomes - not with what people actually live through.

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At Umio, Design with Real Lived Experience (RLX) begins with how life is really felt and lived - day by day, moment to moment - in relation with people, places, resources and systems.

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This creates value that’s not just measurable, but genuinely meaningful - real, lived, and felt by everyone it touches, from patients and carers to professionals.

Why this matters

Real Lived Experience

A Radical New Design Philosophy for Health and Care

Umio Blue Three RLX Book Image Preview Stack Stop Designing for Patients

Out Now

Health systems around the world are stuck. Chronic illness, mental distress, and care inequities continue to rise. Endless cycles of reform, innovation, and restructuring offer only partial fixes. 

Why? Because we continue to look at health and care from the outside in - through metrics, technologies, abstractions, and policies - rather than from within the messy, affective, relational ground of experience itself.

Our new book introduces a radical new approach: Design with Real Lived Experience (RLX). More than a framework or method, RLX is a perceptual and philosophical reorientation. 

Introduction to Design with RLX

 

Design with RLX enables your health and care organisation to .. 

  • 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.

  • Undo the abstractions that obscure real life. Doing so reveals what gets silenced, simplified, or ignored in standard design and planning.

  • 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.

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Umio Bergson
See Real Lived Experience. Anywhere.
 

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. 

Explore Real Lived Experiences Around the World with Bergson.ai

 

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.

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Real Lived Experience Research and Insight
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Relational  Consulting
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Expressive Design Projects
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Co-Composition Labs
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Education and Practice Development
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Speaking, Writing and Thought Partnership

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 Innovators

Health and Care Enterprises

Clinicians, Therapists, Counsellors

Public Health Creators

Community Leaders

Public Policy and Social Researchers

Architects and Urban Designers

UX, Service, and Experience Designers

Academics and Educators

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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.

Testimonials

"Umio’s re-conception of experience and value provides the breakthrough thinking that healthcare and related systems need to repurpose resources and transform delivery."

Prof. Neal Halfon, inventor of the Lifecourse Health Framework

"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."

Daniel Pesut, Emeritus Professor Minnesota School of Nursing

"Masterful .. outstanding .. detailed what and how framework for embracing a dynamic creational .. view based on whole lived experiences."

Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, author of The Co-creation Paradigm

Let's talk