7.1 Designing Preventive Health Technologies and Practices

Corresponding Chairs

Ayşe Özge Ağça, ITI/LARSyS, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Teresa Almeida,  ITI/LARSyS, University of Lisbon, Portugal 

Co-Chairs

Armağan Karahanoğlu, Department of Design, Production and Management, University of Twente

Anna Vallgårda, Head of Section HCI & Design, IT University of Copenhagen

Abstract

This theme track explores how design can play a transformative role in shaping preventive health (Almeida et al., 2016). Moving beyond clinical frameworks and individualised health metrics, we foreground design as a means to engage with everyday, embodied, and overlooked aspects of prevention and care. As caring for one's health increasingly intersects with digital technologies, data infrastructures, and materiality, there is a need to reimagine how these systems respond to the lived experiences of people (Vallgårda, 2025).

How designers frame prevention—what is included, excluded, or made visible—deeply shapes future care. This framing spans intimate experiences to public health outcomes. Collaborative and open-source approaches, including co-creation with communities, are essential for more inclusive and equitable health promotion (for example, Hofstee et al., 2025; Campo Woytuk et al., 2025).

Therefore, we welcome contributions that critically and creatively examine the roles of design and emerging technologies in shaping preventive health practices. Authors are invited to submit papers on topics such as:

• Critical approaches to design that enquire into the roles of embodiment, tangible and bodily materials, and emerging technologies to advance health prevention;

• Feminist and intersectional design perspectives that challenge dominant narratives in health and technology;

• Design methods that foster more inclusive, situated, and culturally sensitive approaches to health.

We aim to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners who are rethinking preventive health not only as a site of intervention but as a space for dialogue, imagination, and collective responsibility.

Keywords

Preventive health, care technologies, health futures, embodied experience

References

Almeida, T., Comber, R., & Balaam, M. (2016). HCI and intimate care as an agenda for change in women's health. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16) (pp. 2599–2611). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858187

Hofstee, D., Karahanoğlu, A., Dijkstra, K., and Ludden, G. (2025). Body Maps as A Source of Women’s Embodied Experiences: A Diary Study into Visualising Personal Health Data, in Karyda, M., Çay, D., Bakk, Á. K., Dezső, R., Hemmings, J. (eds.), Data as Experiential Knowledge and Embodied Processes, 12-13 May, Budapest, Hungary. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2025.110

Campo Woytuk, N., Gamboa, M., Gómez Ortega, A., Park, J. Y., Tuli, A., Tobin, D., Bell, F., Ciolfi Felice, M., & Balaam, M. (2025). Making intimate technologies together. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25) (pp. 2818–2832). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735412 

Vallgårda, A. (2024). Attuning to care technologies. Human–Computer Interaction, 40(5), 273–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2300805