Facilitating the Design of Future Urban Health

How can design processes be facilitated to find solutions for wicked societal problems such as: What if cities could make us healthier? What if hospital systems are broken down into universally accessible and super-efficient health hubs? What role will technology play in the transformation of healthcare of the future? How can design and systems alleviate social isolation, especially among the rapidly increasing population of persons over 65 years? In short: How can innovation, for the cities in which we live, improve our health and well-being? Offering scientific knowledge and tools for urban challenges and systemic issues like the above, the Design Sciences Hub, a tech-transfer organization at the University of Antwerp explores such issues in the so-called Blue Sky Studio. This research studio at the Faculty of Design Sciences applies a co-creative process of Product-Service System (PSS) Design. Using a people- and network-oriented perspective, this multidisciplinary approach brings together professors and design researchers from different design disciplines, including policy and actors, end-users and their context and expertise from the healthcare sector. Simultaneously, the Future of Urban Health serves as prompt for students from the Faculty of Design Sciences. More specifically, this article showcases six projects from first-year masters’ students in Product Development, following a course on Product-Service System (PSS) Design, an annual design studio in the first semester of the academic year 2020–2021. Teams of four students applied the PSS design framework, tasked with considering the Blue Sky Studio challenges as their primary focus. The identified challenges were to be turned into workable avenues for improved or novel designs in healthcare. Based on an analysis of the Blue Sky Studio and the students’ projects, the chapter aims to foreground how insights from material and immaterial actors from various disciplines can be combined to solve wicked problems emerging in today’s society, such as the health-related issues addressed. This chapter describes the working methods and results of both the research studio (Blue Sky Studio) and the design studio (in an educational setting), though a more elaborate version of each project is made available in a virtual exhibition ‘The Future of Urban Health’. The PSS design approach reframes mindsets, empowering stakeholders to identify patterns and address underlying issues. It offers an initial representation of a non-existent system’s identity, ensuring the production of concepts, prototypes and narratives to communicate the citizen-system interaction.