Designing for behaviour change towards healthy living

Looking at the field of public health, we are currently facing a situation where, if no fundamental change takes place, an increasing number of people will have to rely on increasingly expensive health care paid by a decreasing number of people, up to a point that it is no longer maintainable. The call for societal transformation to deal with such major challenges is getting stronger every day. One of the main societal challenges is how to change people's behaviour towards healthy living. Innovative interventions are often needed to disrupt current situations, creating new opportunities for sustainable growth. Through designing innovative solutions that are outside the frame of reference of people, we can allow people to change their behaviour leading to emerging patterns towards sustainable societal transformation. Outcomes of new concepts aimed at long-term societal change are not easy to predict which brings new challenges for designers. By taking design into the wild, involving real people in their real environments and social structures in the design process, more insight can be created into the emergent and changing behaviour resulting from innovation. For this we created Experiential Design Landscapes, infrastructures where designers and society come together and where designers create propositions together with people to experience and use. In this conceptual paper we discuss these propositions, Experiential Probes, to take a new approach on design by putting people central in the process, allowing them to create meaning for themselves in their everyday lives. Through this process we see opportunities to change people’s behaviour and emerge new patterns of behaviour in society, towards in the long run a sustainable healthy society.