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The multidisciplinary minor Well-being by Design has been quite popular among students from different backgrounds for some years. Professor Denise de Ridder, one of the driving forces behind the program, explains why combining knowledge about well-being from several disciplines is both important and challenging.

Denise de Ridder: “Our multidisciplinary international minor has been running for a couple of years now. The minor is hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences with contributions from two other faculties, Law, Economics & Governance and Geosciences. The program consists of five courses, of which students can choose four: one with a focus on individual parameters of wellbeing (Self-Regulation), three with a focus on context parameters of wellbeing (Geographies of Health, Health in Society, and Government & Behavior), and a course integrating both levels (Science of Happiness). Together, these courses provide bachelor students with different disciplinary backgrounds the opportunity to familiarize themselves with important questions relating to how we can design environments and policies that make people thrive."

Subjective well-being in policies and politics

Over the last two decades, subjective wellbeing has gained increasing attention from governments as an important indicator of welfare. Some OECD countries have even implemented a wellbeing dashboard to systematically keep track of wellbeing of the nation. These new developments raise all kinds of questions, including whether population wellbeing should be a concern of government and if so, which measure of wellbeing should governments use then? How much say have citizens themselves in evaluating what kind of things they find important in their own lives? And what about the complex questions of how to take due account of the social context of wellbeing, deal with inequalities, and design public policies to improve wellbeing? These questions guide the multidisciplinary minor.

The challenges of working interdisciplinary

Well-being by design is very popular among both Dutch and international students. It attracts about thirty students each year, the maximum that the minor can accommodate, all with an interest in understanding how well-being can be promoted by public policy, spatial arrangements, and social contexts. Denise de Ridder: “Our approach goes well beyond well-being as an individual asset for which people themselves are responsible – as is the case in many academic courses on happiness that primarily focus on the do’s and don’ts for becoming a happy person. Our students tend to appreciate this approach as many of them complete an extra Honours on Demand assignment, for which they produce blogs, film clips or small surveys examining the arrangements that contribute to wellbeing.”

“And as a multidisciplinary team of teachers, we ourselves enjoy the challenges of working together on this important topic. It is very useful and important to extend monodisciplinary views on wellbeing with an integrative approach.”