Improving Everyday Wellbeing – Week 1

This week we launched the initiative we’ve been working on for several months now – a design challenge with Massey University’s School of Design, focused on Everyday Wellbeing.

The design challenge fits into one semester, and is a double paper for 290 third year students studying Design, across Visual Communication, Fashion, Photography & Industrial Design.

We’re going to be working closely with the Visual Communication department – 160 students – but will also get a chance to see and support some of the other departments over the course of the paper.

Thursday was the first day starting the challenge, and Sam was in ‘The Pit’ to give a solid grounding for the students in Wellbeing. When Massey tutor, Mark Bradford, asked the room how many people felt like they knew what wellbeing was, 4 people raised their hands…

Here’s Sam’s slides from the Wellbeing 101 session:

 

Following the lecture-style talk, students headed into their class groups, and began discussing what stood out from the session, as well as thinking about their own experiences of wellbeing. Some trends already started to emerge:

 

 

 

We were back again on Friday morning to kick off a 3 hour workshop dedicated to two main phases – sparking new connections and nurturing trust amongst the students, and exploring the idea of wellbeing more deeply. The workshop involved a range of group dialogue, interviewing, sketching, human spectrums, ideation and group decision making. We went from ‘not much sense of what this project will be about’, to two floors worth of crowdsourced patterns & themes – in 3 hours.

We cut together a short vignette of Week 1 – we hope you like it!

 

Liked this? Want to know more? We’ve started a Design Challenge hub for all the links, articles and more here.

Designing For Everyday Wellbeing - Week 1

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