Taking an equitable design approach: lessons from designing a mental health service for young Black people

YoungMinds is a young people’s mental health charity whose mission is that all young people can get the mental health support they need, when they need it, no matter what. However, it recognises that its current offer predominantly serves young white people. We need to do better for people from minority backgrounds and marginalised people.

We will share how we took a design-led approach to a project exploring how we could do more to support young Black and Black mixed heritage people with their mental health. We’ll talk through what we did, what we learnt and the discussions, challenges and surprises we had along the way.

Participant Takeaways:

• The reality behind what we call “equitable design” - the opportunities to move beyond “centring” a group and really address systemic challenges, understand the lives of young Black people who are under-represented, and involve them to design solutions with them that can help

• How co-design approaches helped us challenge ingrained organisational assumptions and how we checked our biases.

• The challenges we faced designing for a certain group in a charity that is for everyone.

Themes:
Co-design, equitable design, design sprints, discovery, prototyping , capability building , introducing design approaches.