Sustainable innovation & Women's health
Tamara Hoveling is a researcher, speaker, and co-founder of NovaLilium, the start-up behind the redesign of the speculum "Lilium". Her work is at the intersection of medical design, sustainable innovation, and women's health.
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Tamara Hoveling is a researcher, speaker, and designer in the field of sustainable healthcare innovation. As co-founder of NovaLilium, she works on redesigning the speculum: the Lilium. With this project, she draws international attention to a long-overlooked issue in healthcare: how medical technology can be designed to be more inclusive, user-friendly, and human-centred.
At TU Delft, Tamara is completing her doctoral research on circular design for medical devices. Her research focuses on how design choices can contribute to more sustainable healthcare, with less material waste and more value for the patient, healthcare provider, and the system as a whole. She operates at the intersection of science, design, and societal impact.
With her background in medical design, she looks not only at technology but especially at the interaction between human and system. How is medical technology experienced in practice? Why is something trusted or not? And how do design choices arise that ultimately determine what is used, replaced, or discarded in healthcare?
Tamara’s work and NovaLilium received broad national media attention and are internationally seen as a case within healthcare design, women’s health, and healthcare innovation. Her strength lies in making visible the often invisible mechanisms behind medical technology: from design and safety to use and sustainability.
She regularly speaks at conferences, within the academic world, and in the healthcare sector about sustainable healthcare, circular design, digitalisation in healthcare, inclusive innovation, and the future of medical technology. In her lectures, she connects science and design with the daily reality of healthcare practice.
Good healthcare innovation does not start with technology, but with the question of whom we are designing for — and which groups we have forgotten for years: not only people but also our planet.
With concrete examples from research and practice, Tamara shows how design not only shapes products but also determines how healthcare systems function — and where they get stuck.
Healthcare saves lives, but at the same time belongs to the most polluting sectors in the world. While the pressure on the healthcare system increases, the foundation remains largely linear: produce, use, discard. From her doctoral research, Tamara Hoveling shows how circular design can change healthcare — from less waste to smarter and more sustainable medical technology. About how a sector that revolves around health can itself become sustainable.
A lot of medical technology has been developed from a limited perspective, resulting in the experiences of women being structurally insufficiently considered in design, research, and practice. This has consequences for diagnosis, treatment, and trust in care. With the story behind the Lilium, Tamara Hoveling shows how these blind spots arise — and why they are so persistent in medical innovation. About what changes when women themselves also determine how care and technology are designed.
Medical technology must comply with strict safety standards, but in practice, this often results in products being replaced, rejected, or no longer used faster than necessary. What is “safe on paper” can lead to unnecessary waste of materials, money, and capacity. At the same time, what is perceived as safe by healthcare providers and patients does not always align with what is technically established in protocols. This gap largely determines how technology is used — and how much unnecessarily ends up in the healthcare waste stream.
Healthcare is digitalising at a rapid pace, from electronic patient records to smart medical devices and digital monitoring. But more technology does not automatically lead to better or more sustainable care. Sometimes digital solutions replace simple alternatives, resulting in additional material use, energy consumption, and e-waste. About when digitalisation truly adds value — and when it mainly increases complexity and impact.
Many medical products and healthcare processes are designed from the perspective of one standard user. However, in practice, patients and healthcare providers differ greatly in body, experience, language, trust, and context. As a result, what is “averagely well designed” does not always align with the reality of healthcare. About how design determines who is well served — and who is structurally less well included.
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