As digital technology use becomes widespread, its unintended consequences ranging from personal health to societal righteousness are under more scrutiny. Increasingly, designers accused of not being considerate enough the depth their creations, and impacts on our well-being. In this special issue, we explore an alternative, genuinely human-centered approach design focusing well-being making int...

This paper considers the use of participatory methods in international development research, and asks what contribution these can make to the definition and measurement of well-being. It draws on general lessons arising from the project level, two larger-scale policy research processes sponsored by the World Bank, and the experience of quality of life studies. It also considers emerging experim...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America R development is a leading driver of land-use change and has transformed human and natural communities around the world (McMichael 2000; Alberti 2005; Hansen et al. 2005). The density and extent of housing is a strong predictor of atmospheric carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels (MacKellar et al. 1995) and of the dec...

This paper argues that feelings of agency are linked to human well-being through a sequence of adaptive mechanisms that promote human development, once existential conditions become permissive. In the first part, we elaborate on the evolutionary logic of this model and outline why an evolutionary perspective is helpful to understand changes in values that give feelings of agency greater weight ...

N governments, civil society organizations, and international agencies require reliable concepts and measures of well-being to monitor human progress and design effective development strategies. In consequence, considerable effort has gone into measuring poverty, inequality, and well-being at the individual (or household), national, and international level in recent decades. Among other things,...

Although the effects of invasive alien species (IAS) on native species are well documented, the many ways in which such species impact ecosystem services are still emerging. Here we assess the costs and benefits of IAS for provisioning, regulating and cultural services, and illustrate the synergies and tradeoffs associated with these impacts using case studies that include South Africa, the Gre...

if present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today. The Global 2000 Report to the...

The steroidogenic 18 kDa translocator protein (TSPO) is an emerging, attractive therapeutic tool for several pathological conditions of the nervous system. Here, 13 high affinity TSPO ligands belonging to our previously described N,N-dialkyl-2-phenylindol-3-ylglyoxylamide (PIGA) class were evaluated for their potential ability to affect the cellular Oxidative Metabolism Activity/Proliferation i...