This paper presents two case studies in mental health co-design through a community of practice lens and involving collaborators that extend the traditional binary of ‘users’ and ‘stakeholders’. The co-design was undertaken outside the service sector and oriented towards creating and producing innovative praxis and creative products in service to community-based mental health and rural suicide prevention. By inviting lived experience and creative design practitioners into a mental health co-design community of practice, the paper contends that relational engagements form the container for co-design and allow forms of ethically sensitive and creative community-based mental health design that embody therapeutic activism grounded in place.

3D printing is an essential technology for clinical decision-making, affording significant improvements over conventional imaging alone. Product usefulness surveys offer potential in measuring the quality and impact of 3DP to assist clinical decision-making and patient communication. A narrative literature review (Scoping Review articles only) frames the benefits and limitations of 3D print surgical workflow and user experiences. A usability survey was co-designed with a company to measure the impact of their 3D prints on surgical practice, and secondary data analysis was conducted of to understand the effectiveness and usefulness of the technology in a real-world healthcare setting. Three categories of usefulness and relevance were identified. High-value relevance (positive Likert scores over 70%) related to pre-operative planning, clinical communication, and the value of the technology. Moderate scores (50% to 69%) related to time saving with pre-operative surgery, and effectiveness of patient care and diagnosis. Minor relevance (less than 50%) included direct cost savings, physical resource efficiencies, time in intra-operative surgery, or intra-operative risks. This research considers 3D printings relationship to medical error prevention, limitations and future recommendations for usability surveys of this type and it identified issues around gender inclusion in Design for Health research.

This article delves into the understudied realm of investigating the potential benefits of integrating design thinking into community-based participatory research within the context of culturally diverse dementia caregivers. Following the Double-Diamond process model, we conducted a series of workshops with 15 family caregivers of dementia patients from three distinct communities (multi-racial, Black, and Latino ethnicity) to gain insights into their daily experiences and co-create interventions that could address their pressing challenges. The research question for this study aimed to explore the potential benefits of design thinking in community-based research on dementia caregiving. Our findings contribute to the health design community by demonstrating the potential of design thinking to (1) uncover common and distinct challenges in diverse communities, (2) translate findings into actionable solutions, and (3) design tailored interventions that are responsive to the context-specific needs of the community. Our study leads us to conclude that the integration of design thinking as a catalyst in community-based participatory research has the potential to amplify the identification of nuanced and previously unexamined challenges through empathetic exploration, and to propose innovative interventions that are more amenable to uptake and acceptance within the community.

In this article we describe how designers can apply storytelling to reduce health-related stigmas. Stigma is a pervasive problem for people with illnesses, such as obesity, and it can persistently hinder coping, treatment, recovery, and prevention. Reducing health-related stigma is complex because it is multi-layered and self-perpetuating, leading to intertwined vicious circles. Interactive storytelling environments can break these vicious circles by delimiting the narrative freedom of stigma actors. We theoretically explain the potential of interactive storytelling environments to reduce stigma through the following seven functions: 1) expose participants to other perspectives, 2) provide a protective frame, 3) intervene in daily conversations, 4) persuade all stigma actors, 5) exchange alternative understandings, 6) elicit understanding and support for stigma victims, and 7) support stigma victims to cope with stigmatization. We elaborate on these functions through a demonstration of an interactive storytelling environment against weight stigma. In conclusion, this article is a call on designers for health and wellbeing, scientists, and practitioners from various disciplines to be sensitive to the pervasiveness of stigma and to collaboratively create destigmatizing storytelling environments.

This study describes the development of a paint-based toolkit, which explored how thinking through the act of painting, colour choices and mark-making might enhance meaningful conversation. Painting methods were valuable in creatively engaging patients and staff in co-design activities and helped them consider the focus topic of what ‘care’ looked like and meant to them. As such, we illustrate how a ‘simple’ creative activity can be used to help uncover different perspectives and sense-making around a shared focus. We hope that such an approach may support people to come together to help challenge the boundaries of what insight-driven healthcare might look like.

There has been a continuous downfall in equipping the Primary Health Centres (PHCs) with infrastructure, facilities, and workforce to provide basic minimum primary healthcare services to the underserved population in the Indian context. The main goal of this research is to look at the infrastructure and manpower in a sample of PHCs in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The interview template exclusively for Product-Service System (PSS) by Singapore University of Technology and Design-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SUTD-MIT) was used to study randomly selected samples of 51 PHCs. The data were examined using the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) of the Indian government. Some of the key findings included the lack of workforce and their commitment, shortage of space, electricity, and water supply. To find a solution for the found lacunae, this article also discusses about the functioning of Mobile Hospitals (MHs) depending upon the contexts and thus extracting lessons for a new intervention in the primary health care system delivery model. Finally, a new healthcare delivery model in the form of a mobile Primary Health Centre (mPHC) is proposed based on the field study and the synthesis of historical literature on MH.

With time, there has been a shift in the approach towards location and design of mental health establishments across the globe. In India, the situation changed significantly after the establishment of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. The nature of change has been affected by the history, cultural norms, and climatic conditions of the country as well. However, today, India follows a generalized design guideline that is devoid of country-specific considerations. Moreover, there is a dearth of recent research work based on contextual design and site location considerations for a mental health establishment in India. This paper presents a study on the current policies of India, the existing design and location theories of mental health care facilities and contextualization of those theories on two primary case studies and two possible site locations. The findings are then applied to an academic design project with a discussion on the possible design and location considerations that need to be addressed in country or state-specific guidelines. It is concluded by highlighting the relevance of case-specific, rather than generalized, fit-for-every-place approach, today.

More than half the global population experience menopause, of which a significant number are in part-time or full-time employment. Research on labour force participation reports that employment is often interrupted during the menopausal transition due to difficulties accessing timely medical support and social discrimination. These interruptions result in the loss of professional expertise for employers and financial security for employees. To identify the characteristics of and gaps in design research for menopause we conducted a scoping review of the literature. We sourced and analysed 24 articles, mapping them according to their alignment with three conceptual framings of menopause from the sociology of medicine; a medicalized condition requiring pharmacological treatment, a natural life stage that is managed with complementary therapies, and a demedicalized issue where illness and health are framed as always socially situated. We found that the articles on menopause were relatively evenly distributed across the medicalized and demedicalized framings, with fewer developed within a natural framing. Our findings offer design researchers an overview of frameworks that are commonly used in health research and that we see as productive for further multidisciplinary research collaborations for menopause, and for research concerning the intersections of gender, sexualities, ageing and health more broadly.

To arrive at viable eHealth applications, it is important that future users are involved in research projects. In practice, however, it is difficult to involve potential users and keep them involved. In a multiple-case study, we investigate ten eHealth projects in which design researchers and healthcare researchers worked together. We focus on how they involved potential users and kept them involved. Both domains have a rich tradition of involving potential users and see their involvement of potential (future) users in the early stages of innovation as essential. Therefore it is interesting to investigate projects in which design researchers and healthcare researchers intensively work together. We discovered seven strategies to promote the involvement of potential users in eHealth research projects: (1) use research methods based on building personal relationships; (2) build trust before introducing research methods; (3) facilitate the preconditions around the moments of involvement; (4) facilitate by introducing a prototype as a boundary object; (5) choose the method that fits the research context; (6) integrate the values behind the eHealth tool into the research method; (7) involve proxies instead of the potential users. These strategies may guide future projects where design researchers and healthcare researchers work together with potential users.