Addressing Complex Needs: User-Centric Design to Enhance Wellbeing

This paper addresses intractable wellbeing challenges spanning health, housing and social inclusion needs. Our research on participatory democracy and systemic governance addresses social, economic and environmental challenges of climate change using decision making software that could help to manage risks across interest groups. It has the potential to be applied to much wider social, economic and environmental concerns. We address the following exploratory questions:1. Can participatory dialogue (and conceptual tools and software) enhance representation and accountability? 2. What knowledge maps do service providers and service users have in relation to ways to address wellbeing, social, economic and environmental resilience as well as liveability and the size of our carbon footprint? 3. How does location (hills, plains, coastal areas) impact on decisions to reduce the size of our carbon footprint? Are people in high risk areas more likely to make greater changes than those in low risk areas? The challenges facing the most marginalised in the community in Australia are challenges that could be suffered more widely as we face the impact of convergent social, economic and environmental changes. Climate change will affect the standard of living that is taken for granted by the privileged (Stanley, Hawke Oration lecture 17th Nov, 2008). Our research informs an understanding of how people perceive local challenges with a view to scaling up evidenced based policy to enhance resilience to cope with social, economic and environmental challenges. It provides a means to engage the public in an ongoing way, as well as sum up the themes quickly, transparently and interactively across regions.