Embassy of Health

Health as a Currency: The Waiting Room

Our healthcare, and consequently our health, is increasingly under pressure. Therefore, it is crucial to invest in preventive health. However, in practice, this is more challenging than expected. We often approach healthcare and health from an economic perspective, where everything revolves around numbers. We are accustomed to acting reactively from illness: it is straightforward, measurable, and controllable. When something goes wrong, we treat it, measure the outcome, document it, and send an invoice.

Truly working on health is deeply interwoven with daily life and is, therefore, difficult to capture in numbers. Moreover, we all bear some responsibility, as everything around us impacts our health (or lack thereof). From the living environment to where and how you work; from your wallet to the behaviour of people in your immediate circle.

Investing in our (preventive) health is thus closely linked to our daily existence and only bears fruit in the long term. The challenge is to integrate health as a core value in how we shape our environment—from how we care, to where we live, and the policies we live by.

Dutch Design Week 2024: Value Transitions

The Embassy of Health is exploring, in a three-year programme, how we can regard health as our greatest asset. Through the power of design and new collaborations, we seek answers to the question: How can imagination help us to properly incorporate the immeasurable aspects of health into how we shape our society?

In 2023, we kicked off this narrative, showcasing examples of centralizing soft values through design. In 2024, we will focus on the ‘how.’ How does design contribute to working from immeasurable, soft values? How does design help us reconsider the importance of health, and how does it give health a tangible ‘seat at the table’? What kind of imagination is required for this value transition? What drives us to make healthy investments in the long term?

Welcome to The Waiting Room. Here, we take the space and time to delve into how designers, in practice, use ‘soft values’ to arrive at new solutions. Especially in a space typically dominated by efficiency, we practice pausing, time, attention, and empathy for one another—all crucial for taking the next step from the right values.

Just as when you sit in the waiting room, with design you are at the mercy of trust in the process, even if you do not yet know exactly what is to come. In the design practice, creating this (experimental) space and mutual trust is essential for the playing field where new solutions emerge.

In 2025, we will expand this learning space and aim to experiment with different value systems in practice. The lessons learned and possible futures will be translated into a tangible whole. We will demonstrate how, from the policy table to the kitchen table, Health as a Currency can serve as an innovative perspective.