Designing for Well-Being

Catalog description

This course would focus on the questions of 1) what makes people healthy? and 2) how can we design tools and environments that support healthy lifestyles? Key topics to be covered include public health concepts like the multiple determinants of health and the social-ecological framework, plus a little evolutionary biology; the role of behavior in health, key tenets of behavioral economics and behavior change strategies; and systems thinking concepts from Donella Meadows and others. Students will come away with a much more sophisticated understanding of the complex system of factors and forces that affect people's health; understanding of key systems concepts and some techniques for understanding systems; and experience designing for behavior at scale. A potential final project could be to reimagine/redesign a popular commercial service so that it would have a more health-producing impact -- or, alternatively, to focus on designing changes to the ITP environment that would promote better health for students, faculty and staff. About Steve Downs: www.stevedowns.net