Innovations for Life - Design for Wellbeing

Design for Wellbeing (DfW) will enable persons with disabilities to influence their everyday living conditions through active participation in the design of the assistive devices they use in their daily lives. One objective is to enhance the wellbeing of persons with disabilities by using their descriptions of needs in relation to assistive devices as a starting point for product development. We aim to give users an active role in developing their own assistive devices by allowing people from various disciplines to work with them in a product development team, to improve the wellbeing of persons with disabilities, and to develop product development methodology with respect to a more empowered user role in product innovation processes. This paper reports on the fundamental concept of DfW, but also on two nine-month student projects, CRE[ATIVO]2 and INTELiCare, that have been carried out as joint efforts between Luleå University of Technology, the Royal Institute of Technology and Stanford University