Ecosystems of Well-being Forecast Perspectives
Ecosystems of Well-being Forecast Perspectives
New understandings of health and well-being highlight the importance of imagining health interventions that do not simply act on our individual bodies, but operate at multiple scales.
This set of Health Horizons forecast perspectives offers a view of six key areas of experimentation that operate across the scales of bodies, networks, and environments. These experiments emerge as responses to six key questions shaping health and well-being.
Bodies
Why time matters
New research into our bodies’ internal clocks is revealing that personal timing mechanisms shape the effects of health and medical interventions—and raising questions about how to time interventions to enhance health.
Why spirituality matters
Enhanced measurement capabilities such as fMRI are creating space for evidence-based spirituality—and creating new opportunities, and raising age-old tensions, about ways to quantify and measure spiritual interventions to enhance health.
Networks
Why trust matters
High-trust networks that promote sharing, trust, and localized social safety nets are key measures of health—and leading to efforts to understand and manage the process by which communities create trust and social cohesion.
Why identity matters
Diverse data sources, ranging from social networking profiles to electronic medical records, won’t just offer increasingly personalized accounts of health—but will also force many people to reexamine personal and family health and identity.
Environments
Why measurement matters
Tracking and measuring how physical environments influence health and behavior is creating new understandings of how cities influence well-being—and raising questions about how to address environmental health disparities.
Why place matters
As the effects of local place on health become clear, bottom-up efforts to enhance local environments to improve health will look to optimize physical as well as social narratives of place—and challenge us to rethink ways to enhance community health.
Each of these six perspectives forecast new health and well-being innovations. In addition, each one also offers alternative-futures scenarios, designed to stretch your thinking, exploring how these strategies could evolve in radically different ways over the coming decade. Each piece concludes with a set of implications and key tensions emerging from the forecast and scenarios to jump-start your thinking about possible responses and potential pitfalls stemming from moving this forecast toward action. These pieces were developed as part of Health Horizons’ research on Ecosystems of Well-Being. You can use them to begin developing health and well-being responses and initiatives that will be resilient in a decade of incredible possibility and uncertainty.
Publication Date
Fall 2011
(Public Release: Fall 2012)
