Designing Wellbeing 27/07/2012

Simon and Dan attended a workshop on Designing Wellbeing at the DIS conference in Newcastle on the 11th and 12th of June. They presented a paper based on the diabetes project. The paper is available here and the proceedings of the conference can be found here. Interesting projects from across the world were represented, including a strong presence from Peter Wright’s colleagues at Newcastle University’s Culture lab.

The second day of the workshop involved using Gadgeteer to build prototypes. This was a team activity with the other workshop participants.  Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express. From a central motherboard it allows you to add devices such as sensors and cameras  to create prototypes.  The task was to create prototypes that reflected the previous day’s discussions and that would promote wellbeing.

Simon and Dan were involved in the creation of the ‘moodtubes’ and ‘bWELL’ prototypes – videos of their presentations can be seen here:

MoodTubes from User-centred Healthcare Design on Vimeo.

bWell from User-centred Healthcare Design on Vimeo.

It was a fascinating couple of days and a reminder of the power of design and design research to make a real difference to people’s lives