Preface

I am so pleased to introduce Design for Wellbeing as part of this series of books on design for social responsibility. Wellbeing, as Rebecca Cain and Ann Petermans state in their introductory chapter, has been a term increasingly in use over the past half-century, as an overarching paradigm with which all humans should be concerned. It is not that the dimensions of wellbeing are new, just that we have coined this term and used it increasingly to describe an attribute we should aspire to. Generally, most humans wish to be healthy and flourish through their lived experience, and many also bring into the equation happiness. This book interrogates these properties of wellbeing, whilst being concerned with the role of design in delivering human wellbeing, often alongside global wellbeing in relation to the sustainability of the earth.

Wellbeing results from both tacit and explicit engagement with a designed world that has both physical and psychological properties. This book covers ways in which we design the physical environment, ways in which we design our lives around, for instance, food and its health-giving, as well as its health-taking properties, and how we think about mental health and ageing through the course of our lives, and for a longer life. And finally, it sets these theories and practices in the context of tools developed explicitly for thinking about wellbeing by both the designers and the recipients of design.

This book is part of a series aimed at illustrating the value of design; for example, we have tackled the application of all the disciplines of design to aspects of contemporary life, such as transport and sport, services, policy-making, crime, health and sustainability, illustrating the multiplicity ways in which design is applied to serve society. Wellbeing of course sits amongst all those topics and indeed draws from them.

Designers have been attempting to be socially responsible for at least half a century if not forever, although we also know that design and designers have done some quite negative things in the name of progress. However, we have seen over the last twenty years, through this book series and others, that the design disciplines have understood their broader responsibility and have been moving into areas, or rather illustrating the work they do in relation to agendas, that will it is hoped aid the flourishing of humankind and the earth we inhabit. I am pleased to have supported Rebecca Cain and Ann Petermans in contributing this volume to the series, building a theoretical, practical and very useful reference text and baseline for future work on ‘Design for Wellbeing’.

Professor Rachel Cooper
Lancaster University, UK