Impact in Qualitative Research: Bringing research to life – creating impact case study videos of co-design

Dr Lili Golmohammadi and Emelia Delaney are Research Associates at King’s College London, working on the King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub and co-design for digital health innovation. Their expertise spans design, technology, and social research. Prior to their roles with the Hub, they both worked on projects to support design for sustainability. Paul Lennon is a Lived Experience Contributor and Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Member, who has supported a number of projects at King's College London, including the SURE Recovery App, which aids the process of recovery from addiction.

How do we communicate stories of co-design for digital health in an engaging format? This was a key question for our team of researchers and Patient and Public Involvement (PPIE) members as we began the process of creating our open-access Co-design for digital health course and methods library. We wanted these resources, and the case studies they featured, to be accessible for a range of audiences, including services users, healthcare professionals, researchers, and small to medium sized enterprises.

The course and library are part of a wider set of offerings from the King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Hub is a multi-disciplinary centre created to support the development of digital health technologies, based at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering. In this blog post, we discuss the process of producing our case study videos; mini-impact pieces woven through the course and methods library. These comprise 2-5 minute clips featuring the voices of Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement members, healthcare professionals, researchers, and designers, with images from their digital health co-design projects.

Co-design describes the ongoing creative, collaborative process of developing a product or service with all those involved in its use. It can be guided by a range of design frameworks – in our resources, we have used the Design Council’s Double Diamond, through which co-design stakeholders can first ‘discover’ and ‘define’ a healthcare issue or opportunity that needs addressing, and then ‘develop’ and ‘deliver’ a digital health solution.

Digital health, broadly speaking, refers to the combining of digital technologies with health and care. These range from apps and other online tools for treating or diagnosing conditions, preventing ill health, or promoting public health, to standalone software and interfaces, robots, Artificial Intelligence, wearable devices, and more.

The creative methods, tools, and mindsets involved in the co-design process are particularly suited to helping people to access and communicate ideas more tangibly to others, and to facilitate thinking and solution generation in nonlinear ways. For example, rapid prototyping – making a ‘low fidelity’ 3D model of an idea using materials such as cardboard, paper, and tape – offers a quick and visual way to generate and discuss ideas with stakeholders. The challenge for ‘non-designers’ is that they may not have the confidence to employ co-design methods (and some may also not be convinced of their benefit at first glance!), so having clear examples to illustrate how and why these matter is important.

When planning our Co-design for digital health course and methods library, we identified potential impact case study examples by searching the academic literature and reaching out through our own networks of researchers and PPIE members. Much of this work was ‘tucked away’ – that is, it had been published through traditional academic outputs such as journal articles and long-form presentations, but we wanted to communicate this work in a short and engaging format. Our PPIE members had already reviewed our slides for the course and had emphasised the need to reduce the amount of text and information presented to make things more accessible. With less text and academic jargon, the case study videos also offered a way to speak to a broader audience.

We interviewed people online about their experiences of digital health co-design, originally with the intention of featuring them as ‘talking heads’. Later we realised it would be more effective to overlay their voices with images from their projects (in some cases, where there were not enough images, we supplemented these from copyright-free image websites such as Unsplash). This format was more reflective of the visual and creative approaches of the process and methods of co-design. Producing the videos was a rewarding but time-consuming processes, undergoing multiple iterations in conversation with our team and interviewees to ensure the final clips were accessible, impactful, and complementary to the overarching goals of the Hub.

These final clips provide insights into challenges and advice for working with end users and key stakeholders, as well as showcasing co-design methods and tools in action. For example, Hub PPIE member Lana Samuels, who contributed to the project Remote Consultations in Mental Health, discussing participatory analysis, and Dr Timothy Neate, who shares tips for co-creating personas (character sketches that help to understand the types of people who may use a product or service) with people with aphasia for the creative writing app MakeWrite.