Design and Global Health

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Design offers tools and perspectives relevant to critical problem-solving in global health. This initiative fosters connections between design and global health through events, network-building, and the development of a framework which engages design as a way to both understand and act on global health challenges.

The combination of Bruce Mau’s design vision and the Dahdaleh Institute’s approach to critical problem solving for greater effectiveness, equity, and excellence in global health research is Massive Action: Global Health Design.  

In this series of seminars, Dahdaleh Institute community fellow and visionary designer, author, educator, and artist Bruce Mau will discuss how design methodology is critical to the conversation around global health. Through a series of seminars with specific research projects as case studies, we will explore four areas of focus — youth education, the One Health approach, water safety optimization, and artificial intelligence — looking at them as design opportunities. We will learn how Mau’s MC24 Principles for LIFE-CENTRED DESIGN can be applied to address the most pressing challenges of our time and see how they are specifically relevant to designing global health.    

In the opening seminar, Mau will address caring as the fundamental operating system of design and explore the exponential capacity of design to take on the greatest challenges in human history, how we are already doing that, and why for some reason, we don’t believe it is possible.  

The opening and closing seminars will be led by Bruce Mau and are open to the public.

Seminars 2 to 5 will be focused on specific case studies of global health research projects underway at the Dahdaleh Institute. In each seminar, the lead researchers will introduce their research project, and Bruce Mau will offer insights and lead a workshop discussion on the project’s design opportunities.

Reading material for each seminar will be circulated in advance. The event organizers will consider limited participation in one or more of the case studies if participants register their interest in the signup form.

Mau will demonstrate that design offers a powerful methodology of optimism at a time when mindset and outlook will be critical, not only to our collective success but also to the wellbeing of individual healthcare workers operating under the most challenging conditions in human history.  

More details on the seminars and research projects

This seminar series is co-organized by the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research and York University’s Department of Design.

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