Co-Designing Resources Without Language For The Continence Foundation Of Australia
Project Type:
Co-Design Project
Partners:
Continence Foundation of Australia
Location:
Melbourne, Victoria. Australia
The Continence Foundation of Australia is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to provide information, education, and advocacy for incontinence prevention and management. The foundation provide information translated into 28 languages, however, with over 200 languages spoken in Australia, the foundation saw an opportunity to reach a more diverse audience with their resources.
They engaged Impacto Consulting to co-design with diverse communities, a series of artefacts that could provide information in a way that did not rely on language.
“I appreciated Impacto's ability to gather insights and perspectives from both our employees and a diverse community, which helped us better understand how to communicate effectively without relying on language. ”
Approach
This work was completed in two stages.
Part 1: Understanding the current situation.
The first stage involved speaking to employees and community advocates, to better understand the current resources and gather insights on how to engage the community. This led to a clear problem definition, engagement strategy, outcome expectations, and a draft evaluation framework.
Part 2: Co-designing the resource.
Two on-line workshops were run with a diverse community.
The first session focused on understanding continence issues from a broad range of perspectives and sharing ideas. Small group activities allowed participants to build trust and share their stories. The ideas were then reviewed against project design principles, which included communicating without language, letting people know how to tell if they have incontinence, and sharing the message that safe assistance is available.
The second session was a prototyping session where groups brought their ideas to life and shared them for feedback. The prototypes were then further refined and tested within the community, and then this feedback was reviewed by the co-design team before finalising on final designs to build into a resource.
“The final artefact we co-designed is a creative solution that we are confident will effectively communicate both the symptoms and that there is safe assistance available to a diverse audience. ”
Outcomes
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The Continence Foundation have a creative solution that will effectively communicate information about incontinence without relying on language.
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The testing enabled further learning about how people interacted with the information provided and will also be relevant more broadly when communicating in the future.
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By involving the community in the design process, the Continence Foundation has the prototypes and testing results, allowing them to create the final artefact with confidence that it will communicate the right messages with the right people. Allowing the Continence Foundation to reach a wider audience and provide information in a more accessible way.