Speaker

Chris is the founder of Umio and the author of Interactional Creation of Health: Experience Ecosystem Ontology, Task and Method. 

For the past two decades, Chris has been privileged to meet with hundreds of persons with diverse health issues around the world, and to learn first-hand their whole lived or real experiences with conditions such as obesity, depression-anxiety, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, bowel and urinary problems, type 2 diabetes, diabetic foot ulcers, chronic wounds, and many others.  

He has been fortunate too to spend time with hundreds of clinicians, nurses and careers working in diverse specialties, settings and health systems in the EU and US, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, Brazil and India. In these interactions, he gathered deep appreciation of different approaches for the organization and delivery of care in divergent contexts of practice.  
 
Umio emerged from these rich experiences and encounters. As Chris writes…  

“I began to see not only where existing design and innovation methods were coming up short, but also new possibilities to rethink our approaches for addressing disease and illness, and for creating health in whole lived experience.” 

Chris’ thinking and framework reflect his preoccupations with the manner in which patterns and problems of worsening real experience, widening inequality, growing disease burden and mental illness, and declining life expectancy/quality are occurring. He seeks to overcome the current limitations in both our methods for understanding these problems and in the effectiveness of our efforts to address them. 

As well as leading Umio and applying experience ecosystem thinking in a variety of markets, health and social contexts and geographies, Chris is a freelance academic consultant and lecturer. He is currently an Adjunct Instructor at NYIT and Senior Fellow at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He continues to teach a design studio with undergraduate and postgraduate architecture students at NYIT.