Designing radical shifts in and for planetary health

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic forces us to confront the importance of understanding and responding to global ecologies of health. My health depends on your health, which depends on networks, systems, and webs of planetary health. Attending to health means fundamentally rethinking where (our) health comes from. The importance of considering global health and human health as intersecting is increasingly pressing, and “achieving planetary health will require a renaissance in how we define our place in the world” (Myers, 2017, p. 2867). However, these intersecting health entanglements are vast and complex. These networks or webs include elements that are difficult (if even possible) to be seen or measure in conventional empirical or rational terms.

How might systemic design practices engage with ecological reparation (Papadopoulos et al., 2022) together with global health reparation rather than reinforce individual wellness models? In what ways can systemic design modes and models simultaneously ethically engage within the bodily, social, and political histories of the contexts that they exist within? To what extent does this perspective extend or challenge the existing focus on health and well-being within systemic design?

Thanks to those who have proposed and developed the focuses: Christopher Daniel, Gareth Owen Lloyd, Dulmini Perera, Sally Sutherland, Ben Sweeting, James Tooze, Jeffrey P. Turko, and Josina Vink.

Indicative references

1. Myers, S. S. (2017). Planetary health: Protecting human health on a rapidly changing planet. The Lancet. 390(10114), 2860-2868. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(17)32846-5
2. Papadopoulos D., Puig de la Bellacasa, M., & Tacchetti, M., (Eds.). (2022). Ecological reparation: Repair, remediation and resurgence in social and environmental conflict. Bristol University Press.
3. Shiva, V. (2020). Designing with Nature: Systems design for the well-being of the Earth community. Proceedings of the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD9) 2020 Symposium. https://rsdsymposium.org/vandana-shiva/

Radical shifts in planetary health