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Real Lived Experience

A Radical New Design Philosophy for Health and Care

by Chris Lawer and Nicki Sutton

In a world flooded with fixes but starved of resonance, Real Lived Experience introduces a transformative way of seeing, sensing, and designing with life itself. Rooted in over two decades of global health design, this book offers a perceptual reorientation - one that moves beyond systems and metrics to engage the raw, affective ground of how health, illness, and care are actually lived. For those ready to think and feel differently, this is both a provocation and a path forward.

Paperback, Hardback and Kindle editions. 330 pages. 

Sick of health innovation buzzwords? So are we. This book cuts through the noise ... with feeling.
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"RLX begins with the concrete experience of people as they live through health challenges. At its core, it asks us to see differently. It turns perception outward and inward, encouraging enterprises, innovators and designers to look beyond categories, metrics and protocols to truly attune to what people are feeling, doing, and (sometimes not) becoming."
This book doesn’t just challenge assumptions. It dissolves the ones you didn’t know you were making.
At its core, Real Lived Experience is not just a book - it’s a perceptual rupture. It invites readers to abandon the tired vantage point of systems, strategies, and solutions, and to step into the unfolding, affective ground of life as it is actually lived.  It is a book that doesn’t fix broken models but renders them unnecessary. Its power lies in its refusal to simplify, its commitment to the subtle, and its call to co-compose with the living textures of illness, recovery, constraint, and care. For those who have felt the limits of the system - and of the usual ways of thinking about it - this book doesn’t just offer insight .... It offers an exit.
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Real Lived Experience

A Radical New Design Philosophy for Health and Care

by Chris Lawer and Nicki Sutton

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.

This book introduces our radical new philosophy and approach: Design with Real Lived Experience (RLX). More than a framework or method, RLX is a perceptual and philosophical reorientation. It begins not with systems, services, or stories, but with how health, illness, recovery, constraint and care are actually lived - through bodies, environments, institutions, emotions, and the forces that shape life in motion.

Drawing on our over two decades of global health research and design practice, RLX challenges the prevailing logics of health innovation, including the increasingly questioned paradigm of the social determinants of health. In their place, it offers a set of 12 transformative design principles grounded in attunement, relation, intensity, and co-composition with life as it unfolds.

For innovators, clinicians, researchers, technologists, policymakers, and those with lived experience alike, this book is both a provocation and a path forward. It argues that without radically changing how we perceive and engage with experience, no amount of investment or reform will shift the conditions of health.

This is not a book about improving the patient journey. It is a call to stop designing for patients and start designing with life.

In a world saturated with solutions but starved of resonance, RLX is the future of meaningful transformation in health and care.

Paperback, Hardback and Kindle editions. 330 pages.