Design for behaviour change for health and wellbeing

With an ageing population, increase in stress-related diseases and unhealthy lifestyles, to name but a few, there are a myriad of challenges for improving both health and wellbeing of people. These challenges might be addressed by design. Design within this domain can aim to elicit positive behaviour changes to address health and wellbeing issues. The field of health and wellbeing is broadly defined. The official WHO definition of health formulated in 1948 (WHO, 2006) describes health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” This definition would “leave most of use unhealthy most of the time” and recently there has been some debate about this definition (Huber et al., 2011) suggesting a less stringent view on what being healthy really means. Broadening to the definition of wellbeing, Seligman (2011) proposes that wellbeing is a multi-componential concept comprising positive emotions, engagement, meaning, positive relationships and accomplishment (PERMA).