Designing for wellbeing

The work was organised as a series of twelve projects where Master’s
students, doctoral candidates and professors dived into design for wellbeing
for eight weeks in each project. About 150 international students
participated under the supervision of a dozen doctoral candidates and
professors. The projects did not follow a single agenda or any particular
educational structure, but combined educational strategies, artistic exploration,
user research and collaboration with the cities and their residents in
different and unique ways. The processes and outcomes were all different,
as will be seen in the following chapters and on the pages presenting the
resulting design concepts.
The theme for Helsinki’s World Design Capital year was ‘embedding
design in life’. Design for wellbeing is exactly that. Beautiful design objects
on top of one’s living room bookshelf are no doubt embedded in life – it is
actually difficult to imagine design that isn’t. However, in our project the
embedding is seamless to the extent that telling design from non-design
becomes impossible. Apart from supporting the implementation of the
World Design Capital agenda, there have been other reasons for us to
focus on wellbeing. Socially responsible and ethical design is not exactly
a novel perspective, but it has been outside the mainstream of design for a
good while. During recent decades, designers, and especially design scholars,
have been interested in being methodological and research driven;
they have learned to design collaboratively and to use digital tools. The
commercialisation of design has also been a prominent theme. We need
to go back to the 1970s to find an era of design that was strongly driven by
social responsibility. But now it seems to be coming back. We are again
asking fundamental questions about the real need for objects, the futility
of consumption, about alternative lifestyles and the meaningful things
designers can do to make lives worth living. Design for wellbeing is about
caring, and that is meaningful.
In our projects, design for wellbeing was carried out in close collaboration
with the cities in the Helsinki region. The setting was interesting in many
14 · Design, wellbeing and design for wellbeing