Aza Raskin, the eccentric lead designer at Mozilla’s Firefox, announced today that he’s leaving his position to co-found a startup in the healthcare market with mobile entrepreneur Sutha Kamal and at least one still-unnamed co-founder.
Already well funded by undisclosed investors, Raskin says the company, called Massive Health, will bring a User Experience designer’s sensibility to healthcare. “With health-case costs rising faster than inflation, a crisis is on the horizon,” he writes in a blog post announcing the move. “We need to apply cognitive psychology, the principles of design, and tighter feedback loops to our own health. Health care needs to have its design Renaissance, where products and services are redesigned to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.”
Raskin is an accomplished technologist, having developed projects ranging from the Firefox Mobile concept to the original W3C Geolocation standard. A number of his projects never gained much traction, though; Ubiquity and Jetpack were Raskin-initiated Firefox technologies that never felt finished and didn’t seem to go anywhere.
A frequent and fascinating public speaker, Raskin’s efforts to move into the much maligned health care sector could really shake things up. His move was first reported on TechCrunch, where Erick Schonfeld says they’ll be watching Massive Health closely once it launches. We’ll try to follow it more closely, here at ReadWriteWeb.
