Deep Wellness wellbeing kits
Speculative design for a wellbeing kit that focuses on system problems, not symptom-shaped problems.
The wellness industry is remarkably good at selling individual coping mechanisms for collective problems. Burned out from overwork? Meditation app. Struggling financially? Gratitude journal. Anxious about the climate? Offset your guilt through ethical consumption. These aren’t bad things, but they share a logic: reframe systemic failures as personal deficits, place the burden of coping on the person being harmed, and leave the underlying conditions untouched.
Deep Wellness is a design fiction that flips this. It’s a fictional premium wellness brand, indistinguishable in aesthetic and tone from any real DTC wellness company, that sells kits containing tools for collective action instead of individual coping products. The Burnout Recovery Kit includes union guides and employment rights information. The Financial Wellness Kit contains mutual aid resources and tenant organising toolkits. The form is sincere; the critique lives in the content.
The primary question, aimed at designers: when you’re asked to design a solution, are you treating symptoms or causes? Are you making plasters more attractive, or asking why plasters are needed in the first place?