The Wellness Design Lab: Enlightening everyday experience through wellness practices.

This thesis research explores the topic of wellness from the post-secondary student perspective in this post-pandemic era. It begins with the question: “How might the practice of wellness become an accessible ‘tool’ to maximize everyday experiences and foster a wellness-centred lifestyle?” This research aims to help people move from lacking well-being to feeling well by promoting and embedding wellness practices into everyday activities. This thesis inquires into the practice of wellness from both an auto-ethnographic lens and a participatory perspective. By documenting personal data and my wellness journey through travelling, being outside and disconnecting from society, the auto-ethnographic design experiment employs descriptive reflections, photography and bookmaking. The participatory perspective includes gathering insights from surveys and hosting participatory workshop activities with current and recently graduated post-secondary students. This collected information is then thematically analyzed, and published as a website with the research process. By aligning the similarities from the two design experiments, the findings indicate that reframing wellness as an un-privileged practice and embedding the wellness mindset in everyday lives, could help balance negative emotions and maximize everyday experiences. This led to the summative system design project: The Wellness Design Lab Care Kit, which proposes to elevate daily experiences through personalized wellness practices.