Designing Healthy Communities

Designing Healthy Communities is part of Crabtree’s “Design Thinking for a Better World” series. Each book in the series uses a six-step design thinking process to explore communities:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test
6. Reflect

After explaining the design thinking process, Designing Healthy Communities explores three projects which each deal with an aspect of healthy communities. Each project then presents three cases and asks students to choose a ‘case’ to explore more fully using the design thinking process. The case studies give the students choices among very concrete examples.
The projects in Designing Healthy Communities look at “Need for Active Living”, “Need for Healthy Food”, and “Need for Clean Water”. The cases used to explore these projects come from around the world, including a case from Canada on “Access to Clean Water at Shoal Lake 40 First Nation”.

Each book includes several highlighted Change Makers. Change makers in Designing Healthy Communities include examples from Bangladesh, England, the U.S., India, and other places around the world. There are no examples of Canadian change makers, but there is a link to The David Suzuki Action Plan with “Information on how people can help end the water crisis in First Nations communities” in the “Learning More” section at the back of the book.

The photos are well-chosen to illustrate the text and engage the students in the topics. The layout of the text is easy to read with clear text, highlighted text boxes, and attractive visual aids to draw attention to various aspects of the organization of the information. For example, Designing Healthy Communities includes a text box with American and Canadian statistics.

Did You Know?

Many North American families face hunger.

• Hunger affects 41 million Americans and 4 million Canadians.
• The 13 million children who face hunger in the United States are at a greater risk of health problems and more likely to struggle in school than students who eat well.
• In Canada, over one-third of people who get help from food banks are under 18 years old.

Also included are instructions for how to empathize, suggestions for how to pick the best idea to move forward, getting started, “Mindset Tips”, and many more very concrete strategies for each step of the design thinking process.

Designing Healthy Communities encourages and supports students to become change makers in very concrete ways. Although I have a couple of small quibbles with Designing Healthy Communities, such as the failure to include a visual example of an empathy map, overall, if you are interested in using a design thinking process to explore community issues around food, water, and fitness, you should have a look at this book.