Challenge: Women's Recovery Support

In this workshop, we will guide an interdisciplinary group of designers, recovery workers (and other support staff such as social workers), and people with lived experience of recovery through a reflective co-design workshop. The aim is to pinpoint opportunities for design and to develop ideas for potential service innovations, starting from women’s lived realities of the current care ecosystem.

The workshop will be split into three phases:

(1) understanding the complexities of the ecosystem that women in recovery have to navigate;

(2) developing design ideas in interdisciplinary groups; and

(3) sharing ideas and stitching them together into a realisable response. 

By the end of the workshop, all participants will have a grounded understanding of the lived realities of women in recovery who are at risk of or have experience of being involved in care proceedings. We will have identified spaces for innovation and developed ideas for innovation within some of these spaces. Finally, we will have mapped these co-designed service innovations onto existing support pathways, and indicate novel areas of work. Designers will have gained a deeper sensibility for the needs of this often marginalised and stigmatised community while recovery workers will have gained ideas for service innovation. We hope that some of the teams will be able to take their ideas forward beyond the workshop. 

Something to note for this workshop is that the content contains quotes from women with lived experience. These contain some highly emotive statements about their recovery and their involvement with care proceedings. There are also some swear words. Some of the content may be upsetting to participants.

About our speakers

Angelika Strohmayer

Associate Professor, Northumbria University School of Design, Arts, and Creative Industries

Angelika’s work includes co-leading the cross-faculty Gendered Violence and Abuse Interdisciplinary Research Theme and the Design Feminisms Research Group. She is interested in Feminist and Critical Participatory Action Research and how collaborative textile-making can help us re-frame issues and co-design support services with and for women facing multiple forms of disadvantage by centering lived and living experience.

Laurie Parker

Founder, Sobrly & Research Fellow, Northumbria University

Laurie’s work sits at the intersection of recovery, family recovery, statutory service systems and social care, with a focus on systemic change, challenging stigma, strengthening anti-discriminatory practice and shaping policy conditions for safer and fairer support. She draws on both her lived experience as a mother in recovery who has gone through care proceedings and her professional experience across several community recovery pathways, prisons, organisations and hospitals. Laurie is currently a Research Fellow at Northumbria University’s School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries, contributing research to the Patchworked Care programme.

About the venue

You can find further details about this venue here.