Using Lifestyle Medicine to Design For Health
Friday, August 28th, 2009
The most urgent cognitive design problems we face today have to do with creating artifacts that help us make and sustain the lifestyle changes needed to improve health. Much of the cost of healthcare and the morbidity and mortality we experience in advanced countries (especially the US) can be linked to lifestyle choices and otherwise avoidable health risks.
Designers that work in this space need to be aware of the enormous range of literature on causes, assessments, interventions and effectiveness that have grown up over the last 20 years or so. A great source is the new initiative on lifestyle medicine launched by the American College of Preventative Medicine. They focus on lifestyle interventions (nutrition, physician activity, smoking cessation, safe sex, stress reduction, etc.) and the effective management of chronic diseases (asthma, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.).
Of special interest to cognitive designers is a set of evidence-based guidelines and a supporting literature review for making health-related behavior change.
It is a single source for generating scientifically-grounded design insights and evaluating competing designs across the full range of health-related behavior change challenges.
