Setting the scene
This conversation did not take place at a typical coffee spot. Noa invited me to her workplace: the Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven.
On Google Maps it looks like a cluster of buildings, the kind of place where you leave a bit early just to make sure you will find the entrance on time. I arrived ten minutes early and stepped through the large revolving door into a world that immediately felt different from my usual coffee settings.
Hospitals are places where many lives intersect at once.
Inside, people moved in every direction. A man rolled past with an IV stand on wheels. A woman carefully drove an electric mobility scooter up the ramp. A family entered together with children, perhaps visiting someone or heading to an appointment. A young mother moved through the crowd with a stroller. Some people were waiting. Others stood at a kiosk trying to figure out where to go.
It was a mix of patients, visitors, and healthcare workers dressed in white with subtle accents of blue and green. You could instantly tell who worked there and who was there because life had, for a moment, forced them into the building. Some faces looked worried. Others seemed calm, almost accepting.
Hospitals compress the full range of human experience into one place.
It felt like a busy transit station, but more spacious and less rushed. People coming and going, each on their own journey.
As I looked further down the hallway, I spotted Noa walking toward me. We had agreed to meet at the main entrance, from where it was a short walk to a small espresso bar inside the hospital.
Someone had clearly cared enough to install a proper espresso machine and good coffee equipment. After the grinding and steam, we walked away with what Noa described as the best coffee in the building.
From there we climbed a small staircase and entered a long glass hallway. She pointed upward and explained that above us were surgery rooms, while next to us sat the staff restaurant. We walked past a salad bar and several cooking stations where chefs were preparing for the upcoming lunch.
Noa explained that the hospital puts real effort into serving fresh and healthy meals. Patients receive the same food as staff. No downgraded version. The difference is that staff eat in a separate restaurant area, giving them a real break.
Healthcare is always on. There is always someone waiting to be helped. But if the people doing the helping never get time to recharge, everyone eventually pays the price.
We sat down at a table in a quiet corner. A few tables away, some staff members were taking their break, their low chatter blending softly into the background. As time passed, the room slowly filled until it was bustling with people at lunchtime.
We spent most of our time talking in the staff restaurant, but at one point Noa also showed me her workspace.
To get there we moved deeper into the hospital through corridors that became quieter and quieter. Eventually we entered the technical side of the building, the part patients rarely see.
We passed a corner filled with hospital beds, then we entered what looked like a surprisingly ordinary open office. Most desks were empty. Noa explained that Fridays tend to be quiet because many people work from home that day.
Her desk sat in the corner. Nearby stood rolled-up printed patient pathways covered in Post-its.
It was there that we delved deeper into the work of visualizing and improving healthcare journeys themselves.
What she does
Noa works as a designer inside the healthcare system.
Her work focuses on mapping and improving care pathways: the journeys patients move through from diagnosis to treatment and recovery.
Healthcare systems are incredibly complex. Multiple departments, specialists, handovers, decisions, and forms of communication interact at once.
For most people it looks like chaos. Designers like Noa see something else.
She explained how she takes a complex care system and maps it visually. What initially looks like an incomprehensible web of interactions between patients, doctors, departments, and decisions becomes a structured overview.
Once the system becomes visible, opportunities for improvement start to appear.
From there she works with healthcare professionals and patients to redesign parts of the system and improve how care flows through the hospital.
It is the kind of design work that happens mostly behind the scenes, but directly shapes how patients and staff experience healthcare.
What we talked about
Feminist healthcare design
One of the deepest parts of our conversation was about what it means to be a feminist healthcare designer.
Historically, healthcare systems have not been neutral. Much of medicine, research, and clinical practice has centered white, male, relatively privileged bodies as the default, while others were treated as deviations from that norm.
Those patterns did not emerge by accident. They grew out of broader social power structures, and they still shape how care is delivered today.
For Noa, feminist healthcare design is about noticing those patterns and actively working to undo them.
Not only for women, but for everyone who benefits from safer and more equitable care.
This is not abstract theory for her. It started with a personal experience.
When she was younger she experienced a pulmonary embolism, a life-threatening blood clot in the lungs. Her situation was critical, but with the right care and treatment, she recovered.
Recovery meant long-term blood-thinning medication. For women, that treatment comes with an additional complication.
Because the blood becomes thinner, the impact on the menstrual cycle can become significant. Typical menstruation aids are often not sufficient. Daily life becomes harder and more restrictive.
She experienced that herself.
When she raised it with her GP, the response was simple: this was something she would have to live with.
That moment stayed with her. It exposed something bigger.
Many medical systems and treatments are historically based on research data centered around male bodies. Women are then expected to adapt to treatments and care structures that were never fully designed with their physiology in mind.
Instead of just adapting, she chose a different path.
She co-founded a platform for peers (tromboseoverlevers.nl) and became involved as an experiential expert in scientific research, including ICHOM.
There she brought together the voices and experiences of others who went through similar situations and helped make them visible in the system.
Today, menstruation-related outcomes are included in those measurements.
It showed something powerful: as a designer and experiential expert, impact comes from entering the right spaces and making sure the voices of underrepresented groups are heard.
Mapping healthcare pathways
Noa was one of the first designers working in the hospital. In the beginning many people did not really understand what design could contribute there.
When people hear the word designer, they often think of furniture, products, or branding — not hospital systems.
Her work starts somewhere else.
She interviews patients. She follows healthcare workers. She observes them while they work — not to judge whether they are doing a good job, but to understand what they are actually doing.
She looks over shoulders. Listens to handovers. Traces the route information takes through the system. Notices where communication breaks down, where parallel paths exist without people fully realizing it, and where friction has quietly become normal.
Over time patterns start to emerge.
She begins to visualize what she sees. Not because the visual itself is the goal, but because complexity becomes discussable once it is visible.
One detail I loved:
Specialists are busy and their schedules are packed. Waiting for the perfect meeting to ask questions often means the conversation never happens.
So sometimes she sketches a draft pathway, folds it up, and keeps it in her pocket.
When she catches the right person for a minute she quickly pulls it out and asks:
- What is happening here?
- What are the challenges?
- What can we change?
At one point, she explained how important it is to be mindful of the time and context of healthcare professionals.
Rather than inviting them into meetings, she often goes to them.
She shared how a specialist was difficult to reach, until the specialist mentioned they usually got coffee around eleven.
From then on, she would join at that moment to ask a few questions and move the project forward, without disrupting their day.
That story says something essential about design in real systems.
Designing in a hospital means adapting your methods to your surroundings, valuing each other’s time and expertise, and finding common ground to move forward together.
Visuals are not the end product
Another insight that stayed with me: the visual is not the output, it is the tool.
Visualizing pathways does more than clarify complexity. It stops endless debate.
Once something is visualized, the discussion changes.
People are no longer talking in parallel abstractions. They are responding to something concrete.
They can point to it. They can disagree with what is there. They can spot mistakes, add missing pieces, or see opportunities for improvement themselves.
Without that shared object on the table, discussions can spiral forever. With it, people have something to shoot at.
A visual draft does not need to be perfect. It needs to be useful enough to provoke better thinking.
She showed me another project she called calendar chaos.
In that project she mapped the schedules of specialists, doctors, nurses, and everyone involved.
Color-coding activities and responsibilities revealed how overloaded the system had become.
The result truly looked like chaos. But that was precisely the point.
Making the mess visible did not only improve schedules. It created more mutual respect.
Once everyone could see how tightly packed the others’ days were, awareness grew.
It made clear the system needed to change.
With that understanding, she introduced small adjustments one by one, monitoring their impact and making sure everything continued to run smoothly, while freeing up time that could be spent with the patient.
Outside her work
While recovering from her own thrombosis, Noa noticed how little shared knowledge and support existed for people going through similar experiences.
Instead of waiting for someone else to organize that space, she built it herself.
She is co-founder of tromboseoverlevers.nl, a Dutch platform for people who have experienced thrombosis.
The platform shares patient stories, recovery experiences, and practical information about life after a blood clot.
It also includes contributions from doctors and researchers explaining the medical side of thrombosis and recovery.
It is not a hospital initiative. It is a community-driven platform built around shared experience and support.
People who went through something similar can learn from each other and realize they are not alone in navigating recovery.
What stood out to me is that she cares deeply about others. She does not stop at empathy. She acts.
Keeping the saw sharp
Because there are only a few designers around her in this environment, Noa deliberately creates moments to deepen her skills.
Every month she plans time to explore something new — attending seminars, reading deeply into a topic, or following online tutorials.
Creative skills do not maintain themselves automatically. They require maintenance.
She actively creates room to zoom out and reflect.
Learning sometimes requires stepping slightly outside your comfort zone. That initial tension is part of the process.
Reflections
The empathy bias
One idea from Noa has stayed with me: the empathy bias.
Designers are trained to empathize with the user. But if we only empathize with the users we see, the ones most visible or most similar to ourselves, we may still design exclusionary systems while believing we are being human-centered.
The issue is not a lack of empathy. It is incomplete empathy.
Gender is one layer, but so are race, class, migration background, language, disability, and status.
Awareness is the first step. Acting on it is the real work.
Designers are responsible for confronting their own empathy bias.
Show something early
Visuals are powerful when they are still imperfect.
A rough visualization gives people something concrete to react to.
They can point to what is wrong and what should change.
A visual does not need to be perfect. It needs to be good enough to provoke better thinking.
Build something that is yours
Projects inside organizations can disappear. Priorities shift. Initiatives get canceled.
Seeing Noa’s work outside the hospital reminded me how valuable it is to build things outside systems you do not control.
Personal initiatives remain yours.
Training makes you stronger
The world keeps changing, and tools evolve.
To stay sharp, we need to keep learning with intention.
Making time to experiment and explore is not separate from doing good work; it is part of it.
It is easy to forget this, but I should plan time to experiment and learn.
Presence matters
Life cannot always be optimized. Sometimes the right move is simply to zoom out and notice where you already are.
This conversation took place in a hospital. Around us were patients in the middle of treatment, visitors on their way to someone they care about.
It reminded me that life is fragile. Problems can feel enormous, but when you step back, they often take on a more relative scale.
A reminder that everything can change.
A good coffee in a hospital.
A conversation that stays with you.