Design for Behavioural Change, Health, Wellbeing, and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

Ensuring healthy lives and increased wellbeing at all ages is at the forefront of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The global health crisis sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stark wake-up call, demonstrating the cruciality of people’s health to address social and economic inequality and accelerate sustainability. The broad spectrum of a pandemic requires an integrative response that protects people from health threats. An obvious solution is the design of resilient health systems to empower individuals and communities to act for their own health. 

This Special Issue aims to understand how design and design thinking can influence behavioural change and enhance health and wellbeing. We acknowledge the vital role of creative design solutions to help to promote healthy behaviour and positive emotion and wellbeing, including but not limited to preventing non-communicable diseases (NCDs), boosting the wellbeing of people living with NCDs, and establishing good personal-hygiene-related habits that can influence the occurrence and prevention of communicable diseases such as COVID-19. We invite original theoretical or practical submissions and review articles from the design community that address one or more of the following topics:

• Innovations in health promotion and disease prevention; 
• Design innovations for wellbeing;
• Emotion, health decision making, and health behaviour;
• Behaviour and emotion in emergency;
• Designing health behaviour change; 
• Service Design for mental healthcare;  
• Models and strategies, multidisciplinary approaches, methods and tools for health and wellbeing design;
• Learning through health design projects; 
• Future perspectives for designing health and wellbeing.

Dr. Tang Tang
Dr. Jun Zhang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.