Design for Healthy Behaviors

Catalog description

In Design for Healthy Behaviors, we apply Stanford's philosophy, spirit and 65-year tradition of Design Thinking through a lens of proactive health. You will work on three health-design projects with three different student partners this quarter. You will team up with a partner and work directly with a Patient-Volunteer, who is managing a complex chronic health condition, in the Patient-Volunteer Project (PVP) to help and enable them to improve elements of their health over the course of the quarter. These patients have volunteered, and been referred to our class, by one of the teachers of the course, Dr. Nancy Cuan MD, who helps to lead the Stanford Coordinated Care Program at the Stanford Hospital. There will be two 3-week long Personal Health Projects (PHP) with different partners to improve some self-chosen aspects of your own health. Through these three projects, from the teaching team, from a number of invited guests and from each other, you will learn and use the fundamentals of the Design Thinking process to develop your own process of coaching other's, and guiding your own, healthy habit formation to enable the improvement of long-term health.