Healthpunk

Using illustration-based design to create a website for speculative health futures

Abstract

Healthpunk is an emerging framework for activating speculative methods and futures thinking as a tool for transformative change for planetary health. The term “healthpunk” echoes other “punk” movements in science fiction, such as cyberpunk and steampunk, and especially hopepunk, which stresses the importance of hopeful futures amid challenging times (Romano, 2018). The imaginative challenge consists of envisioning futures in which health, environmental, and social challenges are addressed in an integrated manner that advances safe and just flourishing for people and the planet alike (Maric, Nikolaisen, Bårdsen, 2021; Maric, Chattopadhyay, Webb, 2026). 

Over the last five years, healthpunk stories have been published in three full anthologies and several special issues and formats, alongside experimental academic commentaries, prologues, editorials, and enditorials. Since the first volume, illustrations have played a central role in the emergence of healthpunk, underscoring and intensifying the imaginative nature of healthpunk thinking and writing. As healthpunk continues to evolve, it was time to develop an online home that could collate diverse healthpunk publications and related works in a way that sparks further imagination through illustration. The illustrated website also aims to extend the healthpunk authorship and readership beyond the planetary health and health care sector, by making the growing body of work publicly available in an appealing way.  

The healthpunk website, healthpunk.co, seeks to draw the reader into a space of imaginative speculation, even before the first word is read. The website is run on WordPress using the Divi theme and builder.  All illustrations were created by a professional illustrator (one of the authors of this submission) using a WACOM Cintiq 24 PT and Affinity Studio creative software.

The intention with the dreamy, fantastical illustrations is to invite the visitor to let go of dominant preconceptions about health and embark on a more creative exploration of possibilities for the futures of health. To this end, the illustrations deliberately mix different styles and feature elements not commonly associated with health and common-sense views of reality, including monsters and other extraordinary beings, landscapes, animals, random geometric shapes, flying books, and unlikely architectures. This is to underscore the importance of envisioning health futures that consider health as being linked to many more things, beings, and challenges than orthodox teaching focused on the human body and its physiology suggests, as well as to underscore the importance of thinking beyond what we perceive as possible or even probable today, in favour of a quest for the preferable, desirable and otherwise hopeful.