Healthography! A bigger window on the world when recreation, public health, and design perspectives interact

"Creating the places and spaces in which people can be healthy" is a goal of healthography, but public health tools and interventions can't do that alone.  However, the paradigms and perspectives of two related professions - recreation and design - can expand our worldview to imagine environments that are not only safe but beautiful, spaces that are designed for sentient experiences, and language that tells a story rather than delivers a warning.  Our professions come from the same historical time and place, yet developed apart over the last 100 years as each differentiated itself through its own vocabulary, competencies, and contributions.  21st century approaches will benefit from reuniting these traditions.  This presentation will share the way in which a traditional public health academic department was intrigued, challenged, worried, excited, and ultimately transformed when the recreation program asked to join us.  Determined not to merely take them over, the faculty worked together to explore and understand the subtle but profound differences in our assumptions about the world and the changes we want to be and support.  The result is an emboldened, more imaginative, more appreciative understanding of what it means and what it takes to be healthy.  Key to our expanded paradigm - which now influences curriculum, scholarship, and community-based practice - are the "new" ideas of interpretation, balance, third places and places of the heart, and the recreation assumption that everyone has the right to see something beautiful around them.