Jax Wechsler

In 2021 I worked with Achieve Australia on a co-design program for their My Life : Community and Lifestyle Day Program service. Achieve offer My Life Day Programs to people with cognitive disability across 3 locations in Sydney and Casino. Currently, their attendees are predominantly older people over 30 and they sensed an opportunity to provide programs for Young People specifically.

Achieve chose to take a co-design approach and contacted Sticky Design Studio to support them in this program, working with Young People with Cognitive Disability, service professionals and their families to come up with some new service concepts for Young People aged 14-26.
As part of this program, they also requested some co-design capability building for members of the My Life team.
I worked on this project with Vivien Sung.

Read about the launched program and reflections co-designing with young people with cognitive disabilities on this project.

KEY ACTIVITIES
+ 30 interviews with staff, other service professionals, Young People and Families (including use of diary studies/craft activities by Young People)
+ Staff co-design capability building trainings
+ Delivery of Research Insights, Identification of four Opportunity Areas, and Design Artefacts (Eco-system map, personas, Journey Map)
+ Several online co-design workshops with families, Young People, Service Professionals and Achieve staff
+ Delivery of a few concepts and a detailed Service Blueprint for one service

REFLECTIONS
We worked closely with a group of Young People and parents over several months which was really beneficial for both the Young People and families, as well as for Achieve Staff. There was great endorsement for co-design approach by the senior leadership team and I feel that working closely with the Achieve team to deliver the workshops supported their experiential learning about co-design practice. I trust that we left staff with some new skills to support them in the rolling out of this program and refinement of their other offerings.

Due to Covid we were unable to visit Young People at their homes or to visit the Day Program services at Achieve so we had to get creative with our research methods! Also, working with Young People with Cognitive Disability is very rewarding but also quite hard as each Young Person has their own nuanced abilities. It was a real joy to design diary studies and cultural probes to support the research. Young People and parents were given some creative pre-interview and pre-workshop activities to do to support the process.

I thoroughly enjoyed supporting Achieve with this project!

Some images from the Diary Study/craft kits sent out to Young People