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.