In this podcast, students, staff, and professionals who collaboratively work on real world health and care projects and internships share their experiences and thoughts on the expanding role of design and designers in shaping our individual and collective health and wellbeing in the future.
If we want to live in a healthy world and be well, we must design and create the conditions under which this becomes possible. This new programme facilitates studio-based learning, real world projects, and a creative environment for exploring health and care topics and prototyping ideas for the future through developing a range of visualisation, making, co-design and communication skills.
“(…) to study on the design for health and wellbeing programme is an opportunity to work creatively with others, both locally and globally to become an agile designer [who] can work with experts across many fields of expertise and communities of practice to design the tools, systems and technologies that will be needed to address the scale of our healthcare and wellbeing needs well into the future.” – Irene Bell, Programme Leader
Through a tailored curriculum, the programme offers a unique opportunity for learning and working at the intersection of design, health and society. The focus is on preparing students to work collaboratively with experts across domains such as science, medicine, technology and politics by breaking traditional disciplinary silos, to create collective visions for the future.
“We often talk about collaborating but in working with the Innovation School, I see an evolution of collaboration from sharing knowledge to sharing experiences & in doing so co-creating a heightened level of understanding and insight that leads to a sense of what preferable futures might actually look and feel like. This is important as it increases the quality and real-world relevance of what we do.” – Nicol Keith, Project Partner, Institute of Cancer Sciences, Glasgow University
Innovation School graduates are expanding and re-defining the role of designer as pivotal change makers and meaningful contributors to there-design of our future healthcare needs and experiences.
“I’m now in full time employment as a PartnershipEngagement Officer for Learning Disability Services at North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership. It's a new role so I’m fortunate enough to be able to sort of craft my own journey with it. Despite not having the word design/designer in the title it’s definitely a space for me to be able to collaborate with multidisciplinary teams and members of the community but mostly I find it quite exciting to go to lead with that person centred approach and create accessible and inclusive ways of engaging to be able to transform services byco-designing with everyone.” – Victoria Jamieson, Innovation School Graduate.
“… theskill sets that graduates leave with is characterised by what I refer to as the four C's. These are collaboration between, beyond and with other disciplines, cooperation towards an agreed goal or ambition, especially if that goal iscomplex and doesn't really exist yet. So, we cooperate to frame the future,then we prototype progress towards that future. We deal with complexity arising from the interaction or the overlapping of different forms ofknowledge, different systems, different forms of practice, whether those aresocial, scientific, or technological. And finally, we use conviction. Webelieve that we are prototyping future forms of material and creative practicesthat will be required for the challenges that society faces today and tomorrow.”– Prof Gordon Hush, Head of Innovation School
To learn more and apply to our programme visit: https://www.gsa.ac.uk/study/undergraduate-degrees/design-for-health-wellbeing/
Contributors: Sneha Raman, Irene Bell, Victoria Jamieson, DominicJarrett, Claire Lobban, Nicol Keith, Rosina Scarano, Kirk Gunn, Gemma Teal, Don McIntyre, Gordon Hush
Edited by: Gaston Welisch