Skip to content

Out Now

RLX hardback Solo Standing Umio Copyright 2025

Real Lived Experience

A Radical New Design Philosophy for Health and Care

For too long, health systems have treated lived experience as context - background to technologies, clinical data and outcomes.

This book insists it is constitutive. Real lived experience (RLX) is the very ground of health, care and value. 

If we want different outcomes, we must begin here.

We must perceive lived experience in all its difference, becoming, intensities, and in the wider field of forces that make and unmake health.

This book is a manifesto to begin that shift - offering not just critique, but principles, practices, and examples to help health and care reorient toward life as it is truly lived.

Paperback, Hardback and Kindle editions. 330 pages. 

Health is not built in systems alone, but in the texture of real lives.
Umio Blue Three RLX Book Image Preview Stack Stop Designing for Patients
Chris Lawer and Nicki Sutton Umio RLX Image Background-2
"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."
Not just a book: A challenge to every orthodoxy in health design and innovation. 

"A valuable resource that activates new thinking about the nuances and complexities of RLX in health care. Check it out. Be open to the possibilities."

Dan Pesut, Emeritus Professor. University of Minnesota School of Nursing. 

"This new book from Chris Lawer and Nicki Sutton is quite possibly the most important book on tomorrow's customer experience I shall read this year.  If you have anything to do with the customer experience at all, even if it is not in health care, read the book, then put it down, read it again a few days later and go for a long walk to think about its implications. I can guarantee you will not be disappointed."

Graham Hill, Customer Experience Thought-leader and Consultant

"RLX speaks directly to frustrations I have had over the last quarter century working with social complexity and social emergence. Its talk of fields and ever-unfolding becoming and the associated need for design to be an ongoing process... That's all whispering sweet nothings into my ear. "

Robert Peagler, Social Entrepreneur. Co founder of reparationWorks and the Design Studio for Social Intervention

"I love how you centre the fluidity of real lived experience. Living with chronic illness means change is a constant companion - and innovation must reflect that. Life isn’t static, and neither is good design."

Nicole Thorpe, Real Lived Experience Advocate with Young-Onset Parkinson’s

"Real Lived Experience is a bold, necessary, and profoundly thought-provoking work. It reminds us that health is not a system to be managed, but an ongoing interaction with ourselves, with others, and with life itself - the true ground of wellbeing. "

Bill McAllister-Lovatt, The Disruptive Innovator

"RLX is a wonderful (if not divine) struggle to understand how we can promulgate understanding and practices of helping individuals as such by engaging with them more than, or even instead of, viewing them as categories of suffering to which categories of interventions can be applied."

Gary Riccio, Community Care Exponent

"This is just such an important and exciting read. For those of us with trauma knowledge, the RLX approach is everything we speak about, long for and more."

Caroline Brindle. Trauma Informed Practice Specialist, Creative Psychotherapist at Equinox Therapies
Umio RLX Book Image Title 343434

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 a radical new 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 the authors’ 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 real 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.

Extracts from the book
“Innovation, no matter how advanced, still largely fails to perceive the Real Lived Experience (RLX) of those for whom health is a continuous, embodied, relational, and often contradictory negotiation with the conditions of everyday life.” (Page 7)
“RLX offers a path forward by recalibrating innovation and systems from the ground of concrete lived reality. It challenges us to move beyond seeing health as a set of problems to solve, and instead embrace it as a field of experience to engage with.”(Page 299)
“From inhabiting this real lived experience field and engaging with the twelve RLX design principles, new possibilities begin to emerge - not as fixed outcomes, but as unfolding capacities and openings for becoming.” (Page 294)
“Design that accounts for these forces opens new pathways for transformation by reconfiguring relationships between human bodies and their material environments.” (Page 294)
“Care is not simply about connecting services but about composing meaning, dignity, possibility, and new relations within the flow of real life. And this, above all, is what many professionals are longing to return to.”
“RLX invites enterprises to anchor innovation in the dynamics of experience itself - how people feel, adapt, relate, and seek coherence in the midst of illness, uncertainty, and transformation.”