Designing for wellbeing

Preface
This book is a hybrid. It is a report of the 365 Wellbeing projects that were
part of the Helsinki World Design Capital 2012 programme, it presents
researchers’ thoughts about the increasing interest within design towards
public wellbeing services, and it displays a collection of students’ proposals
for new health and wellbeing services and solutions. 365 Wellbeing
has been one of Aalto University’s flagship programmes during Helsinki’s
year as World Design Capital. It has allowed us to experiment with and
design for public wellbeing services together with the cities of Helsinki,
Kauniainen, Espoo and Lahti. The book is based on this collaboration in
both an immediate and more distant manner. The immediate results are
the design concepts that the Masters students at Aalto University have
created, the wide range of which is an indication of the broad scope of
design that falls under the umbrella of design for wellbeing. The concepts
include discussion starters with artistic twists that have been driven by
individual students’ passions and interests, as well as realistic digital services
developed through a laborious co-design process. The results that
are somewhat more reflective are the chapters written by the researchers
who participated in the projects and tutored the students. Their texts deal
with the ways traditional and contemporary design approaches can be
utilised when designing for public wellbeing services, and what kind of
new approaches we have been elaborating. Our city partners also had the
opportunity to comment on the design process.
Consequently, the book adopts a couple of different roles. We believe its
target audience is also pluralistic, covering readers working in the social,
health, urban development and cultural sectors in cities, but also designers
and design students considering the emerging opportunities within the
reconfiguring field of design. This is why we have tried to avoid technical
jargon and write in a way that is approachable to different readers, while
6 · Preface