Abstract
This track explores how design influences preventive health technologies and practices, considering them as spaces for care, negotiation, and future planning. While preventive health is often examined through medical and technological lenses, design offers a unique perspective by focusing on lived experiences, care relationships, and the processes of making sense of things. In this editorial, we outline five contributions that investigate preventive health across diverse contexts, including behavior change, immersive care technologies, critical perspectives on healthcare systems, health communication, and bio-inspired design frameworks. These findings together show that designing for preventive health goes beyond just predicting or reducing future problems and involves supporting individual choice, encouraging caring relationships, and addressing both uncertainty and excessive trust. These contributions indicate a shift from system-driven interventions toward participatory, situated, and reflective approaches. Through this editorial, we emphasize the significance of designing for autonomy, critical engagement with data, social connectedness, and interdisciplinary knowledge translation, and show how design can redefine preventive health by highlighting its dynamic, relational, and experiential aspects.
Keywords
preventive health; care technologies, health futures, embodied experience
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.241
Citation
Ağça, A.Ö., Almeida, T., Karahanoğlu, A., and Vallgårda, A. (2026) Designing Preventive Health Technologies and Practices, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.241
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Designing Preventive Health Technologies and Practices
This track explores how design influences preventive health technologies and practices, considering them as spaces for care, negotiation, and future planning. While preventive health is often examined through medical and technological lenses, design offers a unique perspective by focusing on lived experiences, care relationships, and the processes of making sense of things. In this editorial, we outline five contributions that investigate preventive health across diverse contexts, including behavior change, immersive care technologies, critical perspectives on healthcare systems, health communication, and bio-inspired design frameworks. These findings together show that designing for preventive health goes beyond just predicting or reducing future problems and involves supporting individual choice, encouraging caring relationships, and addressing both uncertainty and excessive trust. These contributions indicate a shift from system-driven interventions toward participatory, situated, and reflective approaches. Through this editorial, we emphasize the significance of designing for autonomy, critical engagement with data, social connectedness, and interdisciplinary knowledge translation, and show how design can redefine preventive health by highlighting its dynamic, relational, and experiential aspects.