This booklet introduces the topic of ‘community well-being’. In recent years, interest in the relationship between design and human well-being has grown. However, resulting methods are mostly suitable when designing for individual well-being. As designers, we asked ourselves whether it would be possible to design for the needs of communities. A community could be understood as a collection of individual people, and likewise, community well-being as the sum of well-being of all individual members. In this project however, we approached a community as an entity: a network of connected members. This required an exploration of the phenomenon ‘community’ and corresponding community needs that, when applied, can become the starting point of a design process. The resulting guide introduces our framework of community needs and a definition of ‘community wellbeing’ based on this framework. Next, the framework is exemplified by means of a design case with the urban community ‘Stadsdorp Nieuwmarkt’.
Authors
Hester van Zuthem (concept & design)
Reference
Van Zuthem, H.M. (2014). Design for community well-being. Unpublished master thesis. Delft, NL: Delft University of Technology (Download PDF).
Availability
The Design for Community Well-Being Guide is available under the ‘Creative Commons community license,’ free-of-charge for non-commercial use.
