Jasmin Niess

Public health requires collaborations across several disciplines to meet population health needs. Increasing technological advancements have accelerated the transformation of public health to digital public health (DiPH), including new domains to develop, maintain, and improve evidence-based digital technologies. However, having various disciplines collaborating can create unique challenges if there is no mutual understanding of DiPH. This chapter aims to illustrate and discuss interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations in DiPH research and practice. First, we will give an overview of the concept of interdisciplinarity and draw on the practical challenges of interdisciplinary research and best practice examples for promoting such competencies. Second, we will describe traditional public health core functions and their relationship with other disciplines in the social, natural, and environmental sciences and humanities. Third, we will highlight how the extension to DiPH influenced the so-called system of sub-disciplines that form public health. Fourth, we will use a case study on mental health and medical apps to highlight essential strengths and limitations of selected sub-disciplines in DiPH (epidemiology, psychology, philosophy, law, computer science, and implementation science). Finally, we provide seven key recommendations that should promote and foster effective interdisciplinary collaborations in DiPH.

This chapter discusses the need for community involvement and stakeholder engagement in the development and implementation of digital public health tools. The advent of digitalization in public health has necessitated an exploration of how to design tools that meet the needs of the community they serve. This can be achieved through a participatory approach that incorporates the voices and perspectives of all stakeholders in a democratic manner. Specifically, this chapter discusses two participatory approaches: participatory design and participatory research. These approaches originate from different intellectual traditions but share a vision of incorporating everyone from the community affected by the intervention or technology. Additionally, this chapter presents application examples from the literature on how the development of health-related applications benefited from participatory research and participatory design to illustrate the added value of integrating these approaches.

Designing for democracy often emphasizes values but underestimates the role of relationships in shaping civic life. This workshop explores how relationality - our social ties, political agency, and economic conditions - affects grassroots democratic design experiments and the technologies they inspire. Grounded in deep democracy and participatory approaches, we engage in small-scale experiments using Relational Sandbox to explore how new technologies that support democratic values can reshape power dynamics and how locally rooted, tailored designs can counteract capital-driven technological development. By experimenting with relational civics, we will collectively imagine new design strategies that prioritize meaningful technologies for deep democracy over profit-driven ones. This workshop invites designers, activists, and researchers to co-develop strategies and design guidelines that place relationships at the heart of democratic practice.