Designing for wellbeing

opportunities. Design has different meanings and intentions. Often, design
is regarded as an activity that gives form to products. This kind of product
design includes aspects of usability, functionality, ergonomics and so on.
However, within this chapter we see design as giving form to communities,
cultures and places, utilising participatory, empathic and user-inspired
approaches. These approaches put people at the heart of the design process,
and consider their ideas, opinions and wishes in the design brief. In this
sense, design aims to improve, shape and re-shape the social landscape
and people’s interactions within the material, cultural and social world
and their immediate surroundings.
Taking participatory design to the streets and to public spaces has the
fundamental difference of working with the public and communities rather
than within private organisations. The new attitude of design substitutes
the replacement of objects with, for example, fascinating events. The shift
towards a more sociomaterial thinking diminishes energy and material
consumption and brings forth the design of activities and environments
in which more people are active.
Within this work, a design intervention in the public space is defined
as a temporal action caused by a problem, gap, opportunity or programme
between two or more individuals or entities. It usually involves artefacts
that help to create interactions between people, people and places, people
and topics, and people and designers.
This exchange helps designers to:
1. understand the context of the work;
2. get to know the local people;
3. introduce new ways of doing and designing;
4. motivate people to get involved;
5. collect people’s opinions and desires;
6. make sense of problems and possible solutions;
7. measure the success of the design intervention and its
120 · Design interventions for wellbeing in neighbourhoods