‘Making the dust fly’: (A case study of) design research promoting health and sustainability in addressing household infections

Tsekleves, Emmanuel and Ahorlu, Collins and Darby, Andy and Pickup, Roger and de Souza, Dziedzom and Boakye, Daniel (2022) ‘Making the dust fly’: (A case study of) design research promoting health and sustainability in addressing household infections. In: DRS2022 Bilbao: Design Research Society Conference 2022 :. DRS2022 Bilbao: Design Research Society Conference 2022 . Design Research Society, ESP. ISBN 9781912294572

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Abstract

Global health crisis, such as antimicrobial resistance, threaten planetary health, as they have a direct impact on the environment, as well as to humans and animals. Personal and environmental hygiene form the best and most natural ways of reducing home infections and hence the need to take antibiotics. Despite this our understanding of cleaning in the home and interventions on home cleaning are limited. In this paper we present a project, which combined design research with environmental microbiology, to address this issue and to co-design sustainable cleaning interventions for human and planetary health. We focus on the design of a co-design workshop which led to the development of cleaning interventions tested for a month by several households. We share the challenges faced and the lessons learnt, which we envisage will help guide design researchers moving into this exciting research field of planetary and human health.