On May 20th 2021, the Mental Health Patterns Library went live.
On June 16th 2021, we hosted a half-day co-design workshop for people who were keen to contribute to the library.
The purpose of coming together was to co-design new patterns and examples to bolster the Library. It was also our first test of what a get together might look like for a new and growing community.
People joined from diverse professional backgrounds: academics, people working in frontline services, social workers, civil servants, healthcare professionals, service designers, researchers and more. There were around 40 people who attended.
First up, we heard from Tom Norman at Barnardo's and Henry Naylor-Stead at Snook (and previously Barnardo’s) about the story of the Library so far.
After that, most of the workshop was spent in smaller groups in breakout rooms, working together to collectively discover patterns and examples.
There were 3 defined phases in the workshop:
Explore: Working in small teams to uncover patterns or examples that might have been observed.
Build: Working on another team’s pattern or example and building on their ideas.
Act: Working together on the initial pattern or example to submit it to the Library.
Each group had access to a shared deck to work collaboratively on their ideas.
The teams got stuck in straightaway. It was incredible to see how self-motivated and self-managed teams were - sharing ideas across contexts and building on each other’s insights.
At the end of the workshop, most teams submitted the pattern they’d worked on to the website. We had patterns like ‘ease of access’ and ‘provide a visible record of progress’.
Some of the things we learned were that:
Some patterns already on the Library had titles that weren't explicit enough and required explanation on the call
There were some pattern overlaps
There are similar initiatives out there
People say real value in the patterns Library and fed back that it had already provided practical use in frontline contexts
We need to give more time for people to work on patterns and examples. A 3-hour workshop wasn’t enough and some people expressed the need to have longer, less rushed development
The format of the workshop proved to be a viable way of remote working that we may be able to replicate for future get-togethers, enabling people to easily join from across the country.
We're working in the next stage of the governance of how we collect, produce and publish patterns. In short we're going to have a small working group who help to organise the library and co-design sessions going forward. If you're interested in being part of that group and reckon you can contribute some time either sponsored by your company or in your own time, drop Sarah an email and we will convene the first group session at the end of the year. We'll then run quarterly sessions to bring people together on focused areas of the library from crowdsourcing tools to do research on mental health products and services to content design specifics that echo our co-design workshop.
If you’re keen to host a co-design workshop to gather more patterns or examples for the Library, then please do, you can still submit them here. This is, and always will be, a work in progress. And we need your help to support the Library to continue being useful.