4TU Design United Dialogues 4: Health & Wellbeing

Health & Wellbeing

Our health and wellbeing are dynamic, shaped by our bodies, relationships, technologies, and environments. This year’s track presents eleven projects that reveal how design acts across boundaries: from daily rehabilitation to digital connections, from food rituals to material cycles, from designer wellbeing to community bonding. In an era where most people interact increasingly with technology and screens dominate our attention, these projects call for concrete action to align design with our biology, resilience, and care.

Dialogue Session

The Health & Wellbeing Dialogue Session invites participants to explore health not as a fixed state but as a dynamic condition shaped by daily life, technologies, and environments. The involved projects provide provocations: from integrating rehabilitation into routines to supporting designers’ wellbeing, sustaining circular materials, bonding communities, and creating warmer digital connections.

The session unfolds in two parts: Challenges & Boundaries maps tensions and scopes novel areas in health design; Futures engages participants in speculative scenarios that are then translated into concrete action points. Together, we ask: how can design act now to align our products, technologies, and spaces with human and ecological wellbeing?

Programme

9.30 Walk in

9:45 – Introduction of narrative, icebreaker and project pitches

10:00 – Part 1: Challenges & Boundaries
Experience of projects: Freehabilitation, POMPA, Octoping, From Empathy to Vulnerability, Let's Bond,
Exploring challenges and boundaries based on provocations
Wrap-up mapping and discussion

11:00 – Break

11:15 – Part 2: Futures and Action
Speculative exercises on utopian futures
Collective reflection & next steps towards action

12.30 Wrap up and lunch