Co-Design in Mental Health: Mellow: A Self-Help Holistic Crisis Planning Mobile Application by Youth, for Youth

This paper reports on a community-based project to collaboratively research, design and test an integrated digital crisis planning tool for youth ages 13 to 24. Research goals included understanding: what crisis means to the target group
and what strategies they employ for coping with crisis; the ways youth in crisis are most likely to communicate; how new technologies can help deliver the services youth need. The project was established with several guiding principles: that students should act as the front line researchers and designers with the guidance of faculty and community partners; that we should aim to move beyond consultation to truly participatory design methods involving end-users in needs identification, idea generation, design development and testing; and that by having the students interface with the end-users, we would alter the power balance by building trust and avoiding a top-down approach.