Family Well-Being Initiative
Teens during a Your Best You field trip to test their prototypes for improving community well-being
Image credit: Kara Sanchez 2015
Client: Children's Health, Dallas, Texas
roleS: Research Lead; Experience Designer
Design Challenge
To identify and create the conditions for improved family well-being, and to engage families in their health and wellness experiences
Overview
Our team at the Business Innovation Factory partnered with Children’s Health in Dallas to understand how families, communities, and environments contribute to children’s well-being, and to create and test new models for fostering physical, mental, social, and spiritual wellness. Building on previous foundational research and participatory design work, my team at BIF prototyped, tested, and iterated on two concepts that were collaboratively designed with families, community stakeholders, and Children’s Health staff. I also led the research and evaluation for this project, including developing and utilizing a model to assess multi-dimensional aspects of families’ well-being over time.
Process
Our approach emphasized family and community participation and co-creation – for both designing the concepts themselves as well as iterating on them. For three months, my team worked with 16 families from around Dallas, representing a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences, and ages. We prototyped and tested two family-driven ideas to begin to understand their potential impacts on the well-being of families and the larger community:
Video credit: Sam Kowalczyk 2015
What's Cookin': A mobile healthy cooking and eating experience that traveled to apartment complexes and parking lots in the Lake Highlands community of Dallas. Families conducted cooking demonstrations of healthy and affordable recipes, gave out free samples and wellness information to community members, facilitated pop-up physical activities, and fostered relationships with community members.
Video credit: Sam Kowalczyk 2015
Your Best You: A self-discovery, creative problem-solving, and storytelling experience with two tracks that my team developed and facilitated. The first track was a 3-week camp for youth ages 11-17, where they engaged in activities to increase self-awareness and growth, and worked in teams to use a design thinking process to identify community challenges and develop solutions for them. The second track of Your Best You adapted the curriculum for families with kids under the age of 12, leading them through age-appropriate self-discovery and community problem-solving activities. Both tracks culminated in a public event where participants shared stories and presented their ideas for solving challenges in Dallas.
I led the research and evaluation around assessing the models, working with Children’s Health staff to understand ways in which the models and participatory design process created the conditions for increased family and community well-being. At the family level, this involved developing and conducting semi-structured interviews with each family at the beginning, middle, and end of the summer-long prototyping and testing process, as well as online self-assessment surveys for participating adults and teens. At the community level, I created and used surveys, observations, and on-site intercept interviews to assess impacts.
Outcomes
Through prototyping, testing, and iterating on the models, we were able to identify and explain ways that the models and the experience of participatory design itself could potentially affect families’ well-being. Our learnings and insights are being used to guide Children’s Health’s strategies, and both What’s Cookin’ and Your Best You are in the process of being scaled to reach even more families.