By Thomas Brandt, Head of Human-Centred Design Β· Category: Innovation & Sustainability Β· Published 28 July 2026
In medical device design there is a persistent assumption that appearance is decoration β the layer you add once the serious engineering is finished. Sit in on enough user research and that assumption collapses. For a product someone wears against their body every day of their life, how it looks, sounds and feels is not cosmetic. It is a clinical variable.
The visible reminder problem
People living with a stoma, a catheter routine or a long-term wound describe a common experience. The condition itself can often be managed. What is harder is the constant, physical reminder that they are different from the person they were before.
A device that rustles when they move, shows a rigid outline through a shirt, arrives in packaging labelled in large clinical type, or is coloured in the pale institutional beige of a hospital storeroom does something specific. It relocates the condition from something private to something potentially public. And a person who believes they might be noticed changes their behaviour accordingly.
What that behaviour change costs
- Avoiding swimming, the gym, intimacy, close-fitting clothing or overnight stays.
- Catheterising less often than the bladder requires because the routine feels conspicuous in a shared toilet.
- Delaying an appliance change in a public place, increasing leak and skin risk.
- Declining social invitations, with the isolation and low mood that follow.
- Ultimately, abandoning a therapy that was working.
Every one of those is a clinical outcome with a design cause.
Six design decisions that change how people live
- Profile. Low-profile pouching systems and flatter baseplates are engineered so that nothing reads through fabric. Volume is redistributed rather than simply reduced, so capacity is not sacrificed for silhouette.
- Sound. Material selection and film lamination are chosen partly for acoustic behaviour. A pouch that does not rustle when someone crosses a room removes an entire category of anxiety.
- Textile and touch. Soft, water-repellent comfort fabrics feel like clothing rather than clinical film, dry quickly after swimming or showering, and reduce skin irritation from prolonged contact.
- Colour and finish. Neutral, skin-considerate tones and matt finishes avoid the shine that catches light and draws the eye.
- Packaging. Discreet, quiet, pocket-sized packaging that opens with one hand in a cubicle. GentleCathβ’ catheters are designed to be carried and used without announcing what they are.
- Adaptive form. Soft convexity in Esteem Bodyβ’ flexes with the abdomen as someone sits or bends, which is simultaneously an engineering decision about seal integrity and an aesthetic one about how the body looks and feels in clothes.
Designing with people, not for them
None of this emerges from a studio in isolation. Our design process places people who live with these conditions at the centre from the first sketch, not at the validation stage when the important decisions have already been made.
- Ethnographic research. Observing real routines in real bathrooms, at work and while travelling β not in a usability lab.
- Wear trials over weeks, not hours. Confidence is built or lost over time, and short tests systematically miss it.
- Including the carer. Products are frequently applied by a partner or family member whose needs differ from the wearer's.
- Designing for the worst day. A hot afternoon, an unfamiliar toilet, a shaking hand, poor lighting. Products that work then work always.
Dignity is a performance specification
The most useful reframe we have adopted internally is to treat discretion as a measurable requirement alongside wear time, absorbency and adhesion. If we can specify how long a dressing manages exudate, we can specify whether a pouch is audible at conversational distance, or whether a catheter can be opened one-handed and silently.
When a product disappears β under clothing, into a pocket, out of mind β the person wearing it gets their attention back. They stop rehearsing worst cases and start planning their week. That is not a nice-to-have layered on top of clinical performance. For a great many people, it is the clinical performance.
Convatec designs with the people who use our products. You can keep being you.