Project
copilot is a nonprofit service created to stem the rising rates of youth mental illness through awareness and education.
Role Service Designer, User Researcher, Visual Designer, Project Manager
This was part of a semester-long Service Design group project. Group members: Casey McCallister, AJ Mody, and Ana Interiano
My contributions User research, conducting interviews, leading affinity mapping brainstorming sessions and insight generation, video editing, presentation organization, and visual design, deliverable concept and design including the service blueprint and user scenarios
Tools Sketch, Google Docs, Photoshop, iMovie
Goal To develop a support system for youth and mitigate the rising levels of mental illness among young people in America. Create a non-profit created to bring youth mental health awareness and education to adults.
Problem Youth mental illness rates are soaring and not enough is being done to support children in need of help.
Solution A non-profit service created to mitigate the rise of youth mental illness by increasing awareness of mental health issues, educating adults and children, and certification program for adults who can help by further increasing awareness through their own education programs.
Research
Key insights
- Health education is being removed from schools due to lack of funding.
- Yet half of the children in the United States under 18 will have a diagnosable mental health issue.
- According to research, a large majority of parents of children with mental health issues are unaware of their child’s condition.
- Health education is being removed from schools due to lack of funding.
- Yet half of the children in the United States under 18 will have a diagnosable mental health issue.
- According to research, a large majority of parents of children with mental health issues are unaware of their child’s condition.
Process
We started with the broad subject of Health and began by circling around Preventative Health. After a few casual conversations with friends, family, students and co-workers and then affinity mapping our insights, we determined that many of our interviewees were not very familiar with preventative health at all. Wondering why this was, we focused our next steps on Health Education in schools.
To begin learning more about Health Education, we interviewed several parents, school children and teachers, two school nurses, a health education graduate student, and a high school health teacher. These talks made us realize that Health education is sorely lacking in most school curricula, mainly due to rapidly dwindling resources. Since school funding is primarily allotted based on a school’s ability to produce quantitative, testable results, as well as college requirements, this often left health education, among other unquantifiable subjects, far behind testable subjects. As much as we wish we could find a way to solve this issue, this nearly “wicked problem” in the US was a bit too large to tackle in the remaining weeks of our course.
However, another major insight from one of my interviews kept irking me. During my eye-opening interview with a high school health education teacher, I learned that mental health is a sky-rocketing problem among young people and not much is being done about it.
We decided to pivot in order to focus more specifically on youth Mental Health awareness and education. We interviewed a couple more SME’s, affinity mapped our insights and ran through a crazy-8s exercise to hone in on what service we would design.
The following links include our final presentation of the service concept and our process deck detailing how we arrived at our concept and worked through the design of the service.
Summary
We presented our project to a panel of industry professionals who were generally very impressed by our research, concept, and presentation. One service designer on the panel thought it was a great concept and suggested we contact non-profits focusing on mental health and giving them the concept to develop further.
Deliverables
Service Blueprint
User Scenario
Affinity Mapping our Interview Insights
Final presentation of the project
Want to know how we got here? Here’s our process book.
maile malin 