Blending Art with Healthcare: Meet Carbon Health’s Talented Design Team

At Carbon Health, we’re always coming up with innovative new ways to improve healthcare and the patient experience. One group that is constantly experimenting and breathing life into our physical spaces, our website, and our mobile app is our team of designers. Not only are they charged with taking complex or abstract concepts and turning them into functional (and beautiful) images, objects, signs, physical spaces, printed material, web pages, apps, digital tools, and much more — they also honor and celebrate the diverse populations we aim to serve.

We recently sat down with six of our designers, who all help us advance in our mission to deliver great healthcare to everyone — every single day. 

Read on to learn more about these visionaries and why they are such an integral part of our patient and provider experience.

And, as always, we thank all our designers for all they do!

Bobby Genalo, Principal Designer

Carbon Health Editors: What drew you to a career in design?

Bobby Genalo: I was deeply inspired by Rube Goldberg illustrations as a kid. Here was someone, I thought, who could not only imply function through form but also do so in a charming, accessible manner. I slowly discovered that my love of drawing could also translate into a communication vehicle for others to understand complex concepts.

CHE: Why did you decide to join Carbon Health?

BG: I joined Carbon Health to move fast and help others. Having Eren Bali and Caesar Djavaherian at the helm of the ship ensures that our contributions to society are not only rooted in kindness but also scalable, to everyone. Many healthcare organizations choose not to invest in their own ability to transform lives through technology, shifting the responsibility (and risk) to third-party companies. By authoring the systems our staff use to care for others, we’re optimized for tight, self-healing feedback loops.

CHE: What keeps you going? Who inspires you?

BG: I’m inspired by healthcare workers during a pandemic, firefighters during a wildfire, and community organizers during a climate emergency. I’m a big sucker for hope and resiliency.

CHE: What’s some advice you’ve taken with you over the course of your career?

BG: Being humble about what you know and don’t know is foundational to solving someone else’s problems. Developing a simple plan to share your mental model with others and inviting criticism is design research, the most useful tool in a designer’s tool belt to know they’re solving the right problem for the right audience.

CHE: How has living through a global pandemic changed your design approach?

BG: Since the pandemic began I’ve learned to worry less about polished UI and have focused more on ensuring that our understanding of a problem is grounded in reality and that whatever solution we run with is “ergonomically suited” to the people forced to engage with it. Choosing “good enough” over “perfect” is how I’m able to function as a high-throughput designer without burning out.

CHE: Tell us about a project that helped move the company’s COVID-19 initiatives forward. 

BG: I’m proud of contributing to the Carbon Health “COVID Travel Itinerary,” a tool with which anyone in the U.S. can plug in their departure and arrival locations and receive a personalized itinerary with programmatic clinical guidance from Carbon Health’s army of providers. From napkin sketch to production code, a scrappy team of about five people delivered something innovative, useful, and brand-building within six weeks — and just in time for Thanksgiving 2020.

Mel Haasch, Senior Brand Designer

Carbon Health Editors: Have you always had an interest in design?

Mel Haasch: Most of my family are craftsmen, engineers, or makers in some sort of way; I was the odd one of the bunch by having been born with an interest Photograph by Jonathan Nunez

in the arts and abstract expression. Given those contexts, design was a perfect marriage of the two. 

CHE: What projects excite you the most here at Carbon Health? 

MH: I look toward everyday life, especially interactions with people and architectural spaces. I love understanding how others see and use design, and am often fascinated by ways that design shows up in the vernacular — such as street signage, handmade objects, DIY architecture, internet memes, and children’s art.

CHE: What has surprised you the most about people during COVID-19?  

CHE: On paper, art and healthcare might seem the furthest two things from each other, yet your team has been able to blend the two worlds beautifully. How do you think art influences healthcare?

MH: Healthcare is an inherently emotional experience, much like viewing and experiencing art. Everyone carries their own contexts and reactions to the visual things they see, much like the quality of care they receive. Both ideas are really linked by these abstract, intangible qualities, and within that there’s a lot to explore and play with, with a visual palette.

Meet the rest of the team on our Carbon Health Blog!