Category: Home

Student voices are important in the design of health and wellbeing infrastructure. Being young does not automatically mean being fit and healthy especially in low socio-economic areas. The ability to share public space and support services is essential to wellbeing at any age. Co-designing with young people provides opportunities to include their perspectives.

Infrastructure development is increasingly being used as a way to support the wide-ranging health and wellbeing needs of target communities. But few projects directly involve children and young people with other stakeholders as key contributors to decision-making.

Children and young people have increasingly complex health and wellbeing needs and there are insufficient spaces and services to meet demand. Researchers at Queensland University of Technology tackle this issue by involving children and young people in the design of wellbeing infrastructure project.

Place-based approaches refer to connecting infrastructure decision-making with the needs of a local community. It takes a cross-sectoral view of the interrelated infrastructure and amenity needs of a place, and identifies how these should be delivered.

Community hubs

Community hubs are typically multipurpose places that often include health and other community services. In most cases this is both appropriate and cost-efficient. However, few projects directly involve children and young people as contributors to decision-making.

The research project involved high school students, teachers and other stakeholders in designing a new community hub. This hub is to be co-located at a high school in a community with high health and wellbeing needs.

Co-design and participation

Inclusive co-design with and for children and young people requires support to participate and keep them interested. There are four key factors: Space, Voice, Audience, and Influence:

• Provide safe and inclusive spaces for views to be expressed
• Give support and information for expressing views
• Those in authority must listen to the views shared
• Views must be taken seriously and acted upon by those with the power to influence or make decisions.

The article outlines the methods and provides illustrative examples of the students’ views and ideas. Feeling connected to the space was the overarching concept agreed by all stakeholder groups. The diagram taken from the research paper shows the four functions of the hub: community, health, social, and preventative health.

The co-design process revealed the essential nature of the social function – something not previously considered by the organisations involved. The process also provided an opportunity to “flesh out” what the social function might entail.

The title is, Co-designing place-based co-located health and wellbeing infrastructure and services with high school students, educators, and health service providers.

From the abstract

This research involved working with high school students, teachers, Guidance officers/School Counsellors, and other stakeholders. The project involved co-designing a new Community Hub co-located at a high school in a high-priority community .

We describe the co-design processes for engaging children and young people and adult stakeholders in the ideation and design phase of infrastructure and service development. The object is to support the health and wellbeing of a high priority community with high health needs.

The key insights pointed a way forward for the next stages of infrastructure and service delivery development. it also led to the development of several visual depictions of the complexities of stakeholder interests. Meaningful engagement of potential future users of place-based integrated health and wellbeing services enables responsive infrastructure designs that meet future needs of both target communities and service providers.

Participation and co-creation in healthcare.

A special issue on co-creation in healthcare research has several related articles. The first is Practices of Participation and Co-Creation in Healthcare: A Workshop Report.

Abstract

Participatory research in the health sector is fraught with obstacles. In particular, choosing appropriate methods to involve the heterogeneous stakeholders in the health system can be difficult. Not only are time constraints and hierarchies between professional (and non-professional) healthcare actors a challenge, but also dealing with patients who may have different physical and psychological limitations.

Accordingly, not all qualitative methods are applicable to all stakeholder groups. Limitations such as speech or visual impairments can make it difficult to participate in focus groups or design workshops. With a workshop at the European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in 2024, we discussed experiences and lessons learned with participatory methods in the health sector. The workshop showed how different challenges were dealt with and thus opened up a space for reflection on participatory projects.

Other articles in this issue look at using visual metaphors, ideation, and challenges in participation of vulnerable groups in design processes.

People with disability are often left out at the beginning of the research process when organisations want research done quickly. This reduces the level of power they have as members of the research team. For co-design in research to be effective, people with disability must be in decision-making positions before research proposals are developed.

People with disability are expected to be involved as researchers and decision-makers in research projects. But co-design methods require respect for the process from the outset.

Researchers have to navigate tensions inherent within research institutions when involving people with disability from the beginning of the process. Improving the quality of the research is one of the aims of co-designing with people with disability. It also gives an opportunity to employ people who might not otherwise find a job.

A research team led by Flinders University use a case study to show how to engage with prospective co-designers. They looked at the different factors or conditions that enable or constrain co-design work, and how they relate to each other. The funding of commissioned work has an effect on the internal dynamics and relations within the team. They also found that authority and power can shift and change depending on how these components interact.

Clearly there is more to simply gathering a group of people with disability within a research team and thinking co-design will just happen. Factors such as institutional requirements, and authoritarian hierarchies can have a significant impact on co-design processes.

The title of the article is, Shifting power to people with disability in co-designed research.

People with and without disability need to work together to resist when co-design work is not treated with respect by people or systems.

From the abstract

This paper explores tensions navigated by researchers and project leaders when involving people with disability as experts in co-design and in the core team. Part of an evaluation aiming to improve paid employment of people with intellectual disability is used to consider this work.

Structural conditions of funding and institutional support were foundational to the co-design. These included accessible practices, core roles for people with disability and resolving ableist conditions.

Power shifts were easily undermined by institutionalised norms that disrespected the co-design contributions. The value of co-designing research was centre to articulating key issues, methodology and analysis.

Co-research with Experts with Disability

The following abstract is from a paper that requires institutional access for a free read.

The title of the paper is Inclusive Co-research with Experts with Disabilities.

Abstract

Existing co-research methods often limit participation and perpetuate exclusion of highly diverse populations. This chapter introduces an approach to co-design research that is inclusive and supports full participation of individuals with unique or diverse needs.

Co-research has moved from the “design for” perspective to the “design with” perspective, and more recently to the “design by” perspective. Design by means that the population most impacted by the design is supported in creating the design.

Inclusive co-design is a mindset that is applied in three ways: appreciating, scaffolding, and keeping (the ASK approach). Appreciating involves recognition of co-researchers as experts in their lived experience. Through scaffolding, co-researchers are supported and given the means to participate fully in the research process.

Keeping gives ownership and builds capacity within the co-researchers and their communities in the research process and outcomes. Each of these three aspects are described in detail, building on our own experience from over one hundred inclusive co-design research activities, to provide guidance and approaches to other researchers who want to engage in inclusive co-design research.