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The present paper explores the notion of co-design as healing by focusing on a project with participants facing mental health problems, who met once a week, guided by open design processes. Reflecting on semi structured interview data, as well as relevant literature from different disciplines, the paper offers a conceptual framing of how co-design can be considered as a healing practice, at a systems, social and individual level. At a systems level, co-design allows working with complexity, and approaching mental health problems holistically. At a social level, co-design empowers collectives to negotiate what realities to change and how. At an individual level, codesign affects people’s wellbeing, by enhancing their sense of agency and connection, stimulating thinking and essentially providing a grounding embodied experience. The paper offers a lens through which to reflect and expand on what we do as designers, and supports the notion of co-design as healing with initial evidence from one project.

Background\ud A co-design project, consisting of individual and collective design activities, was organized with clients of a mental health service, in order to explore its potential to support people with psychosis. The group met for approximately two hours, weekly, for six months, participating in design activities and collectively deciding on the project purpose and outcome – a boardgame.\ud \ud Methods\ud The experience of one group participant (Anthony) is explored, selected as the first case study within an Interpretative Phenomenological Analytical (IPA) framework. Following IPA’s ideographic focus, Anthony’s case was purposefully selected, as it portrayed a detailed picture, informing theoretical reflection on designing as therapeutic. The paper includes Anthony’s first-hand account, combined with an analysis of data from three semi-structured interviews, photographic evidence and a reflective diary kept by the lead researcher.\ud \ud Results\ud Results suggest that, for Anthony, design activity: a) helps developing a sense of agency b) is experienced as grounding in reality c) contributes to the development of inter-personal relationships, and d) has a different sense of rhythm than artistic practice.\ud \ud Discussion\ud These results are contextualized within literature on the lived experience of psychosis and suggest that designing can be beneficial for people with psychosis, providing the backdrop for further research and practice.

The paper provides an overview of a co-design research project organized in collaboration with a mental health charity. Clients with mental health problems volunteered to help explore how engaging in design activities may impact them. Often adapted to respond promptly to the context, a series of workshops aimed to engage people with mental health problems in exploring matters of concern, defining issues and responding to these through design within a frame of layered participation. For 10 weeks, activities took place once a week for approximately 2 hours, although participants could drop in and out at any time. Four participants engaged quite consistently throughout the process, working with the researcher/facilitator. Under the general notion of co-designing for wellbeing, the project was organized around 5 stages, called 5 I’s: Identify, Ideate, Invent, Initiate and Implement. The project concluded with interviews, and an event to showcase the process and design outcomes to others. The paper discusses the challenges and opportunities that emerged in the process and provides a short summary of participants’ insights on their experiences. Their accounts variably suggested that the project helped with thinking, coping with loss or grief, reflecting on one’s past, or adversely prompting hidden anxieties. The paper ends by discussing how this experience may help inform future projects within mental health and reflects on the potential role of co-design as an activity that promotes recovery in its own right.

The paper presents some initial theoretical insights on why designing may help people with experience of psychosis. The paper reviews how psychosis has been discussed in the literature from a phenomenological point of view, and how it links to designing by looking at the themes of agency and embodiment. These insights are then used to formulate the hypothesis that the experience of designing, and design iteration, may pose a continuous force (and have an indirect effect) towards the coupling, or pulling together, of dimensions of experience such as perception, cognition and action which in psychosis are sometimes experienced as particularly fragmented. The paper contributes to our understanding of design and introduces the idea of design as treatment for the development of design projects to support mental health.