Ask Joy Borgardt about her job and she is reminded of a quote from Sherlock Holmes. “No Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design.”
Borgardt is a Principal Research Engineer in AbbVie’s Human Factors group. She uses the Holmes quote a lot because her job is all about design. Her job is to be the patient before there ever is a patient. Nothing she does is by accident. She has pored over every icon and pull tab on a potential medicine’s packaging. Today she is working on devices to make sure they can deliver medicine in a way that is easy and simple for patients to understand. A package or device for a Parkinson’s disease patient will be very different than a package or device to deliver medicine to a rheumatoid arthritis patient.