Briefing

The COVID pandemic has changed many aspects of our daily lives and has brought on heated discourses about health care in the political arena, general public, and at family breakfast tables. Rarely has the public spotlight in the media and in social media turned to unveil the importance of our social systems and the fragility of critical infrastructure. Additionally, the urgency of the global crisis has demanded rapid innovation and supply of vaccines which has changed our view on the role of the state to provide critical state-of-the-art medical infrastructure, medication, and treatments.

As we lean towards an endemic future it is time for us – in our role as strategic designers – to start to reflex, reimagine, and design new images of the future that we want for us, our families, and for society when we think about health care.

In this course, you are asked to engage with the art and practice of “Design Futuring”. You will learn to expand your ways of using design from a user-centered approach to a future-centered approach in which you use design to explore what futures seem possible and which of these are desirable. Under the central theme “Design for Care - Imagining futures of health care in communities and society” it is up to you to come up with a project that innovates, speculates or criticizes the future of healthcare in society. For example by analyzing and improving existing objects/products/tools/services, by showcasing future scenarios of better, alternative forms of health care or by inspiring debate about human consequences – social, cultural, and ecological implications of health care, both positive and negative.