Symbiotic Futures: Health, Well-being and Care in the Post-Covid World

The "Symbiotic Futures: Health, Well-being and Care in the Post-Covid World" project was jointly conceived by the Innovation School at Glasgow School of Art and the Institute of Cancer Sciences at the University of Glasgow. The project partnership involved a community of experts working across both organisations including the University of Glasgow’s new Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre (ARC). Future experiences is a collaborative, futures-focused design project where students benefit from the input of a community of experts to design speculative future worlds and experiences based on research within key societal contexts. This iteration of the project asked the students to consider what happens in the Post-Covid landscape ten years from now, where symbiotic experiences of health, well-being and care have evolved to the extent that new forms of medical practice, health communities and cultures of care transform how we interact with each other, with professionals and the world around us. The GSA Innovation School’s final year BDes Product Design students and faculty formed a dynamic community of practice with health, wellbeing and care practitioners and researchers from The University of Glasgow and beyond. This gave the students the opportunity to reflect on the underlying complexities of the future of health, well-being and care, technological acceleration, human agency and quality of life, to envision a 2031 blueprint as a series of six future world exhibits, and design the products, services and system experiences for the people and environments within it. In the first part of the project (Stage 1), Future worlds are groups of students working together on specific topics, to establish the context for their project and collaborate on research and development. In this iteration of Future Experiences, the "Health, Well-being and Care" worlds were clustered together around ‘People focused’ and ‘Environment focused’, but also joined up across these groups to create pairs of worlds, and in the process generate symbiosis between the groups. These worlds were then the starting points which the students explored in their individual projects. The second part of the project (Stage 2) saw individual students select an aspect of their Future World research to develop as a design direction, which they then prototyped and produced as products, services, and/or systems. These are designed for specific communities, contexts or scenarios of use defined by the students to communicate a future experience. These Future experiences reflect the societal contexts explored during the research phase, projected 10 years into the future, and communicated in a manner that makes the themes engaging and accessible. The deposited materials are arranged as follows: 1. Project Landscape Map - A report and blueprint for the project that gives a visual overview of the structure and timeline of the project. 2. Stage one data folders - the data folders for stage one of the project are named after the themes the groups explored to create their Future Worlds. 3. Stage two data folders - the data folders for stage two of the project are named after the individual students who created the project.