Lili Golmohammadi, Emelia Delaney, Wei Liu, Siobhan O’Connor, Louise Rose, Annie Howitt, Sebastien Ourselin, and Glenn Robert
In this workshop, we explore two central components of co-design: building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders and using creativity as a means of engagement, within the context of digital health.
Co-design is the process of creating a product or service in collaboration with the people who will use and realise it. Co-design offers valuable relational opportunities, creating a shared ‘liminal’ space (Donetto et al. 2021); a transitional zone where roles and hierarchies are softened, meaning stakeholders can engage more equally. This fosters deeper understanding, challenges assumptions, and opens up new possibilities for alternative healthcare practices. Unlike traditional health improvement methods such as surveys or anonymous feedback, co-design emphasises human connection and dialogue, with the creativity of design methods and tools acting as a central means of engaging people to step outside their usual roles to imagine different futures (Robert & Macdonald, 2017). However, such creativity amongst non-designers requires careful scaffolding; structured, accessible steps that build participants’ confidence (Sanders & Stappers 2008).
This online workshop collaboratively explores strategies to foster relationship-building and creativity when co-designing for digital health. We draw from our own experiences and from interviews we conducted with service users, healthcare professionals, researchers, and designers during the production of our co-design resources at the King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub in the United Kingdom (King’s Health Partners, 2025). Workshop activities support the exchange of attendees’ insights and experiences, offering a reflexive space for future work.
The workshop is facilitated by design researchers Lili Golmohammadi and Emelia Delaney.
KEYWORDS: co-design, digital health, healthcare, liminal space, relationship-building, creativity as engagement
RSD: Health & Well-Being, Learning & Education, Methods & Methodology
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The RSD14 workshop folder contains a downloadable brief with each workshop's context and background, agenda, facilitator profiles, and key references.