Co-design in mental health; Mellow: a self-help holistic crisis planning mobile application by youth, for youth
Elise Hodson, Nastaran Dadashi, Ramón Collazo Delgado, Connie Chisholm, Robert Sgrignoli, Ronald Swaine · The Design Journal · 2019
This paper reports on a community-based project to collaboratively research, design and test an integrated digital crisis planning tool for youth ages 13 to 24.Research goals included understanding: what crisis means to the target group and what strategies they employ for coping with crisis; the ways youth in crisis are most likely to communicate; how new technologies can help deliver the services youth need.The project was established with several guiding principles: that students should act as the front line researchers and designers with the guidance of faculty and community partners; that we should aim to move beyond consultation to truly participatory design methods involving end-users in needs identification, idea generation, design development and testing; and that by having the students interface with the end-users, we would alter the power balance by building trust and avoiding a top-down approach.