The Islands of Automation

We’ve automated the pieces. Who’s designing the whole? Every team optimizes its own island, disconnected from the rest — leaving patients and users to bridge the gaps alone. This talk challenges service designers to stop perfecting silos and start designing the connective tissue: the human thread that unites fragmented systems.

Forces

Format

Keynote

Day

Thursday, Oct 15

Room

Auditorium

Time

10:45 PM

Why is this conversation important now?

Healthcare is living its own automation rush — AI triage, digital patient journeys, connected devices, back-office automation — each deployed by a different team, on a different timeline, often without talking to each other. Patients don’t experience departments or systems; they experience one continuous journey, and every gap between automated islands becomes their problem to solve, often at their most vulnerable moment. This conversation matters now because healthcare can’t afford efficient parts and an incoherent whole — the cost of that fragmentation isn’t just user frustration; it’s clinical and human.

Who is this session for?

Service designers, UX leaders, and innovation practitioners working in complex, highly regulated environments (healthcare, public sector, enterprise) — anyone grappling with the gap between fragmented automation efforts and the need for a coherent, human-centered experience across organizational silos.

Key takeaways

What are the key takeaways? What will people leave with?*
A new lens: automation isn't the goal — coherence is. Efficiency at the silo level can still produce a broken experience at the system level.
A practical mindset shift: from "how do we automate this piece?" to "who is designing the connections between the pieces?" — a question most organizations never explicitly own.
A call to action for service designers: to position themselves not just as builders of individual touchpoints, but as architects of the connective tissue — the ones responsible for the whole patient journey, not just their department's slice of it.

Alessia Rullo

Alessia Rullo

Head of User Experience and Design Validation @ Roche Information Solutions

Alessia Rullo is Chapter Lead for UX & Design Validation at Roche Information Solutions, based in Barcelona, where she leads a distributed team of designers, researchers, and human factors engineers across Spain and Austria. She holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, with research focused on neonatal intensive care environments, and has spent her career at the intersection of design, technology, and healthcare. Before Roche, she was Advanced Design Manager and Creative Director at HP, shaping products across its Large Format Printing portfolio. Alongside her industry work, Alessia teaches at IED Barcelona, coordinating the Master’s programme in Strategic Design Management, and consults on innovation and design strategy for organisations including EIT Health, the Government of Andorra, and Miura Private Equity. Her work centres on patient-centred innovation and bringing rigour and empathy together in design validation.