Embracing Complexity: Reimagining Design for Health Education

Design for health (D4H) has emerged as its own context for practice, with a corresponding rise in universities offering courses and activities that implement D4H projects in various ways. For the most part, these tend to expose design students to health-related contexts and problems or facilitate interdisciplinary collaborative opportunities. This paper presents an overview of 10 years of D4H curriculum interventions in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. This culminated in the justification and development of a four-paper D4H minor as a strategic offering within a Bachelor of Design programme. The paper presents the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the D4H minor, shows how the new minor supports the staircasing of student learning and provides examples of student work from the first cohorts. The D4H minor positions “design for health” as a strategic curriculum innovation to help students apply creative, practical, problem-solving skills to complex problems.