Sustainability and scenario building. Scenarios of sustainable wellbeing and sustainable solutions development

Shared visions on "sustainable wellbeing" are needed to orient the political and economical debate and to conceive and promote sustainable solutions. Scenarios and specifically design-orienting scenarios (DOS) may play an important role in promoting the social generation of these shared ideas, and more specifically, in creating favourable conditions to conceive and develop sustainable solutions. The paper discusses these themes, articulating them in three parts: (1) the introduction of the design-orienting scenarios and of their potential role in the generation of sustainable ideas of wellbeing, (2) the discussion of the traditional and emerging ideas of wellbeing and of a general framework of new, sustainable ones, (3) the presentation of two series of design workshops on scenarios of "sustainable ways of living", that have recently been held in Europe and in China.