Visual Language: Designing Wellbeing
Description
Instructor
Bill Hill
“The wellbeing or quality of life of a population is an important concern in economics and political science. It is measured by many social and economic factors. A large part is standard of living, the amount of money and access to goods and services that a person has; these numbers are fairly easily measured. Others like freedom, happiness, art, environmental health, and innovation are far harder to measure. This has created an inevitable imbalance as programs and policies are created to fit the easily available economic numbers while ignoring the other measures, that are very difficult to plan for or assess.”
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life)
This intersession course will build on the research initiative Rethinking Health that began last semester in courses taught by Jeremy Alexis, Judith Gregory, and Chuck Owen. We will be exploring how a “YOUser” centered approach to wellbeing might be integrated into our healthcare systems at a fundamental level.
Teams will identify, research and prototype ways of integrating practices such as diet, exercise, yoga, meditation, etc. in ways that will address the fundamental issues of ReThinking Health and invent new ways of responding to the problems articulated in the Wikipedia citation above. Given the brevity of the course, rapid prototyping of concept maps (http://dubberlydesign.com/baseball.html), business visualizations for a retail environment (think “Curves” for Wellbeing) or a health care provider (http://www.kaiserpermanente.org/), sketches for a social networking site or communications device, etc. could be employed.
The goal of this will be to explore how the design processes and practices pioneered at ID can be applied in a personal, human-centered manner to an area of importance to society.
