I’d like to first set-out some of the foundational concepts of my framework – Umio Health Ecosystem Value Design or HEVD – the main method deployed in the Design + Health Open Studio at NYIT this Spring semester.
Also, I shall briefly propose how the framework informs the method and task of transdisciplinary urban design with health …
The first important concept is how the framework defines health itself.
Although wholly incorporated, it is not a framework solely for health care, its design, innovation and organisation.
Rather it is a framework for the transdisciplinary creation of health, with health defined in its widest sense as a power for acting, accessing, creating and sustaining a desired valued life or lived experience.
In this wide and normative reframing of health, we move beyond a narrow bodily, baseline functioning and “resource for living” definition of health.
Instead, we see health as a capacity for accessing and acquiring affects – sensations, feeling states - of positive lived experience constituted by ten relational elements of what I call social desire – a full expected life duration, bodily vitality and integrity, creativity, belonging and attachment, social purpose, human connection, connection with nature, play and participatory freedom.
Second, with health defined widely as an affective capacity for living well, the framework helps to address three difficult and usually neglected questions in the empirical health and life sciences and associated disciplines. These are:
1. (Origination) How do lived experiences with health originate or form, especially chronic diseases such as chronic pain, obesity, respiratory and cardiac disease as well as social dis-eases such as the experience of abuse and violence, neglect, exploitation, injustice, inequity and inequality.
2. (Becoming) Second, for any given focal context, how do lived experiences with health/disease become different over a duration of experience?
3. (Persistence-Recurrence) – Third, how and why do certain ill-health experiences persist and become concentrated in types of individuals and groups, communities, neighborhoods, places and spaces?
To address these questions, the framework deploys an interactional and enactive model of human agency, the third core foundation.
It views the human as an interactional agencial being whose lived experience is actualised from interactions with other human and material entities also having agency in four registers or affective domains.
These are…
The organic-bodily- motor register of interactions within the body, with what we put into the body – food, drink and drugs - and its motor or movement interactions – the usual focus of the physical health care disciplines
The social-cultural register of interactions with other persons and groups, with and in organisations and in our communities
Material-spatial interactions with objects, technologies, buildings and other material forms as well interactions in and through our built and natural environments. – pertinent to other context today.
And finally the perceptual and cognitive register of sensemaking, perception and meaning making of interactions in the other three registers
Through diverse interactions with both human and non-human entities in these four registers, people’s lived experiences become actualised and variously stuck or stabilised via transitions in affects – sensations, impressions, feeling states and their various qualities, content and expression – and their different affective capacities to harness desired or repel undesired affects.
A fourth core concept in the framework is a movement beyond static empirical methods for seeing, identifying, categorizing and representing experience as typically found in maps, socio-demographic- economic categories and identities, quantitative data abstractions and emotion-based expressions of experience.
Avoiding an exclusive analytical empirical tendency, the framework identifies a virtual real domain of pre-experienced affects, capacities and tendencies that serve as the originating generative mechanisms of lived experiences with health and disease and their differentiation.
To support the transdisciplinary design task, the Umio framework distinguishes nine interactional flows in this virtual field, each bearing certain types of natural, man-made and human / social entities bearing potential affects and capacities. These include material artefactual entities such as buildings and other formed elements in the built environment.
Translating this conceptualization of a virtual field and incorporating another foundation in the framework – six tendential forces that influence them, we see that any place – urban or rural – already contains certain predominant pre-experienced intensities, qualities and relations of affects, capacities and tendencies.
This virtual real view of experience formation helps us to see the hidden negative pre-experience affects and stuck tendencies present in poor neighborhoods, spaces and communities which, via ongoing interactions produce experiences of disease, often over generations; especially forces of negative affects and tendencies of hopelessness, despair and exclusion that diminish the potential capacity for realising social desire in health for a place and the people who live there.
With this view, for any focal context of lived experience, we can frame a virtual field – or what I call a focal experience ecosystem – for any given place such as a small town in the Arkansas Delta.
Doing so helps us to see who are the affectees of this experience – the people, groups, communities affected – and the affectors – the non-human environmental and material elements as well as the human ideas, tendencies and actors having positive or negative influence.
Critically, our lens on lived experience transcends disciplinary separations of learning, design and action, themselves products of tendencies of observation, method and creation.
And thus, we see the open city design + health task as the transdisciplinary design of ideas, interactions, flows, spaces and material forms bearing potential capacities for individuals, communities and places to access and sustain health as social desire in lived experience.
So to summarise, these are the four core concepts of Health Ecosystem Value Design applied in our NYIT Design + Health course this spring semester.
1) A wide definition of health beyond care as capacities of social desire
2) A focus on experience origination, differentiation and persistence questions
3) The perspective of an entangled human being in interactional flows
4) Framing the learning-design purpose within a virtual real field or experience ecosystem for a focal context of experience
Following the Health Ecosystem Value Design method and using the pre-built templates which you can download from the Umio website and explained in the book, our student’s journey was as follows:
First, select and research a small town or city in the Arkansas Delta, define a focal context of lived experience and then frame the project and purpose
Second, map the affects characterising poles of capacities of the focal context
Third map the experience ecosystem – the virtual field - of human and non-human affectors influencing the ongoing production of lived experience
Fourth, reflect on their own and others’ tendencies of perspective, method, design and action to draw out the transdisciplinary view
Fifth, with this critical reflective perspective acquired, design the desired transitions in lived experience for targeted affectees
And only then move into the architectural / spatial project design activity …
View a video of this talk ..