Creative wellbeing. Prototyping an arts-health practice program for mental health recovery

Abstract

Collaborations between designers and healthcare professionals are at the core of design for health, with calls in this journal for partnerships between designers and occupational therapists. This article follows these calls. It discusses a research project where designers, occupational therapists and inpatients of a mental health unit collaborated to prototype an ‘arts-health practice’ program for mental health recovery. During the development of this project, we constituted a ‘lo-fi living lab’, a collaborative platform that resulted from combining participatory design and autonomous design frameworks. As we show, this platform enables collaborative design processes that give priority to the creative practices and co-creative projects that healthcare communities have in their everyday life. It also reframes the role of designers and allows them to learn from those practices and become participants in those projects. The ‘lo-fi living lab’ format, we argue, makes it possible to run collaborative design projects that empower health staff to do their work in creative ways; allow designers to learn from the ‘everyday design’ practices of healthcare professionals; and creates non-disruptive platforms for user participation in the design of health services.