The Dwellbeing Initiative is a collective inquiry into the ways we occupy, dwell and live within our spaces to understand how they can work towards bettering our wellbeing. The initiative aims to inform and induce a sense of spatial belonging, by positioning itself as a place of knowledge access for better spatial living.
As a portmanteau of dwelling and wellbeing, the initiative is the outcome of a research driven project that was conducted at the intersection of belonging, spaces, and people. With the advent of the pandemic, our relationship to our spaces had fundamentally changed. Considering our spaces play an immense role in defining who we are, it was imperative that we understand how we relate to them, to foster wellbeing through the moulding of the spaces. This project began by studying the themes of belonging, spaces and how people dwell, through literature studies, analysis and conversations. This was followed by speculating terminology to define the specific concept of belonging to spaces, and their aspects of influence. And finally, this project culminated in the creation of an inquiry through which further research and knowledge sharing can be conducted.
The Dwellbeing Initiative currently comprises an online Instagram community to engage in conversation around our spaces and how we occupy them, an online digital repository that exhibits Spatial Stories of people’s relationship to spaces as well as Ways of Space that presents a continuously updated list of spatial interventions for fostering wellbeing, along with speculative phygital objects that work as tangible representations of the aspects of spatial belonging. Fundamentally, this is a research-driven project, with the aim of sharing all that is learnt, and hence all articulations and knowledge generated is shared freely under an open-source license.
