Diagram
Co-designing postnatal mental healthcare solutions
🚩 Problem
Postnatal mental healthcare spaces have few resources catered to women of color (WOC). WOC struggle more than white women in the healthcare system.
🥅 Goal
Innovate and design out of the box solutions for postnatal mental healthcare for WOC. Collaborate with Diagram to conduct exploratory co-design workshops.
💡 Outcome
Created research plans that would lead to useful postnatal mental health solutions for WOC.
Synopsis
I reached out to Diagram LLC, a New York based healthcare design studio, to learn more about co-design and service design in the healthcare space.
Over the course of five months, I worked with the founder of Diagram to conduct exploratory co-design workshops to understand more about the postnatal mental healthcare space. I conducted five workshops with doulas and moms. I synthesized data with abductive reasoning and affinity mapping. I created a flowchart that outlined what I learned. I left Diagram with research plans for future studies.
Scroll for more details on the full process.
📝 Process
Understand the Background
I conducted a literature review to understand what struggles birthing people were having and why.
I completed a positionality diagram to understand my own privileges/biases that might impact the study’s participants from fully opening up to me. This helped to level the playing field with participants when conducting sensitive research.
After learning about the most common struggles, I worked with my mentor to conduct a reframing and brainstorming session, which led to drafting several initial research questions.
Brainstorming session
Reframing Template
Conduct Primary Research
I conducted in-depth interviews (IDIs) with birthing people and doulas to further understand their struggles after giving birth. This research helped me identify the problem and define a final research question/HMW statement.
I approached answering my research question through five co-design workshops with doulas and birthing people. Together, we brainstormed solutions to their pain points using a series of visioning exercises.
I recruited subjects by leveraging mine and my mentor’s networks.
Research Question
🧠 Synthesis
Affinity Mapping using Abductive Reasoning
I used an affinity map to organize the patterns I saw in co-design workshops with birthing people and doulas.
I used abductive reasoning to find connections between unrelated patterns. I collaborated with other design researchers to workshop our observations and create insights using Miro.
💥 Impact
Create and Iterate Research Roadmap
I mapped the insights I saw from the co-design workshops into an easy to digest chart. This was circulated to the Diagram team.
I created “what if statements” and “HMW statements” to begin exploratory research, eg. “What if birthing included advocacy for the parents’ desires and needs?”. These questions helped develop next steps and research plans for Diagram to ideate a product.
I also created a co-design research process with feedback from my mentor. This flow helped me understand how good co-design is done and also teach others how to do co-design in my workplace easily.
Codesign Flow Created
