Well-being and Care Lab

Our care vision defines 'caring' as: “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain,
continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our
bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining
web.” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990). From this perspective, this care lab aims to: (1) work closely with all (non-)human care actors; (2) support actors in rethinking ‘what is’ into alternative futures; (3) ensure
active flow between education and research; (4) generate impact at various levels (care recipient, care organization, care system), in addition to knowledge and education.

This lab employs a transdisciplinary approach involving material exploration, participatory
making processes, and artifacts. This working method offers insight into the complex reality of care and helps develop tools,
methods, and frameworks. The inquiry-driven setup links research and design practice to the healthcare industry's needs for collaboration on 'wicked problems': complex issues without a straightforward solution (e.g., autonomy in dementia, staff burnout, accessibility of mental healthcare).

The lab focuses on Mode 2 knowledge production (Nowotny et al.): transdisciplinary, context-bound, participatory, and socially embedded knowledge development. Stakeholders (researchers, designers, professionals, care recipients) develop solutions together through iterative, speculative, and material processes. Design serves here as a method to generate insight into problems and solutions, and to speculate on alternative futures, through artifacts or scenarios.