Maarten Houben (TU/e),  Eda Karaosmanoglu (TUD), Siyuan Huang (UT), Zhuochao Peng (TUD), Govert Flint (TUD)

More than half of the global population lives in cities and spends more time with screens than with one another. Our health and wellbeing are increasingly shaped by man-made environments, technologies, and products that do not always align with our biology. This misalignment can make us vulnerable—but it also opens opportunities for design to act, not in distant hopes but in grounded interventions that restore connection, resilience, and care.

The Health & Wellbeing track from Design United at DDW 2025 embraces the theme “Less Hope, More Action!” by showcasing eleven projects that engage with health as a dynamic condition. In these projects, vulnerability is not framed as a deficit or label but as a shifting state that everyone experiences, influenced by daily life, systemic dependencies, and moments of change. Design responds to this dynamism by creating tools, environments, and practices that transform fragility into action.

We encourage visitors to visit and experience two projects at the Design United exhibition at the Klokgebouw:

• Freehabilitation decentralises rehabilitation from medical facilities into daily routines, enabling patients to integrate recovery into the flow of everyday life.
• The Digital Detoxery is a pop-up installation with five immersive artefacts that brings to light young women’s struggles with social media, fostering dialogue about mental health, comparison, attention and agency

The dialogue sessions invite participants to engage directly with this theme through exploring the challenges but also the futures of ‘Health and Wellbeing’ in Design. These projects further expand the boundaries of health beyond the clinic, into digital communication, ecological cycles, material choices, and social bonds. 

• From Empathy to Vulnerability acknowledges the sensitivities of design work in health contexts, offering embodied tools to support designers’ wellbeing.
• Octoping explores emotional connection at a distance, using playful soft robotics to help couples bridge the gaps left by text and video calls.
• POMPA. Pumping up Circularity investigates how material cycles intersect with health, highlighting how sustainable practices can reshape wellbeing.
• Let’s Bond positions social connection as central, creating spaces for community and care that strengthen collective wellbeing.

The projects in the e-magazine showcase how wellbeing is relational, constantly shifting, and deeply shaped by the environments we design:

• Awakening Hammer: Ritual of Qi presents a playful prototype combining interactive tech and qigong-inspired practices to bring simple wellness rituals into daily work life.
• From Care Pathway Mapping to Data Strategy Implementation reimagines nasal reconstruction care after skin cancer through integrated communication, service design, and digital infrastructure.
• Wave of Care proposes family-centred frameworks that make digital health tools more supportive of shared care management.
• Experience Garden is a multisensory garden for people with dementia and partners, offering touch, sound, and nature to foster calm, reconnection, and social engagement.
• False Prophets of Food reveals the hidden rituals and belief systems of consumerism, challenging our dependency on unsustainable food systems.

The Health & Wellbeing track ultimately argues: health is not static stability but lived dynamism. By acting from vulnerability, design transforms environments, technologies, and rituals into sources of wellbeing. In doing so, we move beyond hope and into action—grounded optimism made tangible.