As artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous and its infrastructure increasingly commoditized, the innovation center of gravity shifts from engineering capability to philosophical clarity. The decisive questions are no longer can we build this, but why we build it, what assumptions we encode, and which values we operationalize. Philosophy becomes the primary differentiator. The choices we make about meaning, agency, purpose, and human experience ultimately define our products far more than the technical stack beneath them.
Every product is a philosophy expressed in design.
This dynamic becomes especially consequential in health technologies, where design choices directly configure how life is sensed, interpreted, and acted upon.
Before a single measurement occurs, a system has already embedded a worldview: assumptions about what matters, which bodies become legible, and what forms of life count as intelligible. Technologies do not simply observe the body; they shape its possibilities.
In Healthtech 3.0, the defining competitive advantage is not data, algorithms, or insights—it is the ontology a company brings into being.
Borrowing from the theory of quantum physics, physicist-philosopher Karen Barad offers a useful language for this, calling the integrated arrangement of tools, models, assumptions, and interactions the apparatus. An apparatus is not merely a passive witness but an active participant in making the world it measures. Because measurement is world-making, the design of health technologies is always, consciously or not, an ontological act—one that generates the realities in which both patients and practitioners operate.
In quantum physics, measurement does not uncover a fixed truth; it produces one. Heisenberg and Bohr showed that observer and observed are inseparable, and that observation collapses the quantum wavefunction (encapsulation the myriad of possible arrangements) into a concrete phenomenon.
Healthtech operates under a similar logic. Sensors, assays, and algorithms determine what counts as legible data, translating physiology through filters that are never neutral. What becomes measurable becomes actionable—and what becomes actionable becomes “real” within a system.
Karen Barad’s philosophical framework, agential realism, expands the quantum logic beyond the realm of the small into the fabric of everyday phenomena, showing how matter, meaning, and measurement are co-constituted across all scales. It reminds us that technologies shape the worlds of meaning and practice we inhabit. Under this lens, Healthtech 3.0—the convergence of biology, computation, and behavior—is not merely a digital extension built on top of medicine. It is a world-building engine that defines what health and sickness mean, and ultimately, how human life can unfold. We are not only quantifying life; we are programming what life can be.
The diffractive stack describes how coherence across the three technology layers—the scientific, infrastructural, and experiential—turns a healthtech product into a living apparatus. When insights from one layer interfere with and inform the others, the system becomes adaptive, self-correcting, and contextually alive. This is epistemic coherence: a unified, dynamic logic of health that enables scale. Many healthtech failures trace back to incoherence across layers, where biology, code, and experience diverge into incompatible worlds.
To build a diffractive apparatus, companies must align their philosophical commitments across:
This is where the three layers emerge as the foundational building blocks of diffractive design.