Designing for wellbeing

capable of contributing. He sees this capability as two-fold, referring to
the experiences in two of our student projects that followed very different
processes. In one, design students were able to contribute through adopting
the process of user-inspired design, which combines user insights about
everyday activities with designers’ insights and their ability to transfer
ideas across disciplinary borders. In another, students used subjectivity
and emotional sensitivity as a level to allow meaningful contributions
despite a lack of specialised disciplinary knowledge.
Collaborative development, or co-design, of services has been a major
research interest in design recently and was also very prominent in 365
Wellbeing. Both chapter 4 by Kirsikka Vaajakallio and Tuuli Mattelmäki and
chapter 9 by Sebastian Greger and Zagros Hatami deal with the merits of
co-design, underlining two main benefits. First, when co-design is organised
as a cross-disciplinary project, giving a fair amount of freedom for the project
teams to adjust their goals and processes, it is possible to identify new
service concepts that are essentially different from present ones. These may
not all be ready for implementation, but they contribute towards defining
future service offerings by presenting alternative perspectives. Second, the
authors explain how collaborative design can be used as an approach to
shorten the social distance between different stakeholders within public
service development. Health service users, medical personnel, public
administrators and consultant designers all have their expectations and
ideals when it comes to service design, which are justified and understandable
as generic principles. When it comes to practical implementation, the
solutions derived from these principles lead to systems that either ignore
important perspectives or are weak compromises giving little value to
anybody. Co-design is a process that builds mutual understanding and
facilitates joined-up thinking for stakeholder groups, focusing the design
challenge for mutually optimal solutions.
Several of the chapters discuss novel design methods that we have
noticed are well suited to the collaborative design of public services and
16 · Design, wellbeing and design for wellbeing