Design & Health on a Global Mission

Professor Alan Dilani, PhD

Architect / Public Health

International Academy for Design and Health

dilani@designandhealth.com

www.designandhealth.com

www.worldhealthdesign.com

Design and Health on a Global Mission (click to download full paper)

While clinical practice focuses on treating illness, there’s also a raft of research to suggest that the quality of our everyday surroundings has a highly important role in supporting our health and wellbeing. The World Health Organisation defines health as ”a state of complete physical, psychological and social well being, and not only the absence of illness.” Health can be divided into two different perspectives: the biomedical and the holistic. From a biomedical viewpoint, health is considered to be a condition without diseases. In the western world, the biomedical perspective has been the leading perspective and thereby created the medical and healthcare industry. The holistic viewpoint emphasises multiple dimensions of health, including the physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual and social.

From a research perspective, health can be divided into a pathogenic and salutogenic starting point. Pathogenic research focuses on explaining why certain etiological factors cause disease and how they are developed in the physiological organism. The primary aim of pathogenic research is often to find medical treatments. Salutogenic research is based on identifying wellness factors that maintain and promote health, rather than investigating factors that cause disease. Together, the salutogenic and the pathogenic approach offer a deeper knowledge and understanding of health and disease.

Hospitals should focus on providing “wellness” as well as treating illness; we are living in a post-industrial age. Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing and recovery, where the sick go to get well.

Modern healthcare is a global matter, which requires a global forum to support knowledge transfer and a continuous dialogue on issues that impact on the health and wellbeing. Today, in this turbulent business climate, a rising public awareness of the importance of health and wellbeing and increased demand for well-designed, humanistic environments, requires more than ever the engagement of an interdisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners and industry to support innovation and progress in the field of design and health.

The International Academy for Design and Health has facilitated this process, by organising the Design & Health World Congress and publishing World Health Design to support and develop knowledge of research based design.

The global mission of Design & Health is to understand and develop the key factors determining the design of modern healthcare systems, buildings and technologies worldwide, helping to spread knowledge of the successes – and failures – of different regions of the world in the development of psychosocially supportive design.

Keywords: Design and health, psychosocially supportive design, salutogenic design