Co-designing for mental health: creative methods to engage young people experiencing psychosis
Ivana Nakarada‐Kordic, Nick Hayes, Stephen Reay, Carla Corbet, Amy Hai Yan Chan · Design for Health · 2017
This paper describes the development and use of creative methods to engage young people experiencing psychosis in co-creation of an online resource to support their education and wellbeing. Engaging young people in a meaningful way, let alone those experiencing psychosis, can be challenging using traditional research methods. Throughout a series of discovery, and prototyping and evaluation workshops, we successfully engaged young people, their families/carers and clinicians in hospital and community mental health settings in enjoyable and empowering co-design activities. These co-design sessions were largely inspired by young people's extensive use of social media metaphors and were adaptable to their interests, preferences and mood. We used storytelling through emojis, a relatable persona with emotion mapping, a card sorting activity and an icebreaker that involved the group co-designing a pizza for our lunch. In the prototyping and evaluation workshops, emotion abstract sketching was used to guide the look-and-feel of the future resource. Using creative methods can enable more than just active engagement of young people with complex health issues. Engagement through creative activities can help draw out the unique experiences and perspectives of potentially vulnerable young people so that solutions that most effectively meet their needs can be explored and developed.