Daniela Sangiorgi and Sultan Serpil Erdonmez
The role of a territorial co-lab for resources emergence and integration
Mental health is shifting from focusing on the treatment of disease (clinical recovery) to the promotion of complete well-being (personal recovery) (Slay & Stephens, 2013). This recovery shift requires the innovation of individual services and organisations, as well as the overall transformation of the ecosystem of diverse actors that can assist in the continuity of care. The novel concept of care ecosystem is helpful to describe this transition as it recognises the “dynamic and co-evolving community of sovereign and unique organizations, independent care providers, informal caregivers, care networks, patients and other actors, who directly or indirectly co-produce care or develop care innovations.” (Mohr & Dessers, 2019). Care providers need to recognise and facilitate the integration of this diversity of resources to offer personalised support for the changing needs of individual recovery journeys. Design for mental health has shed light on issues of power dynamics (Farr, 2013) and mental models change (Vink et al., 2017), as well as systemic dynamics when aiming for transformational change (Sangiorgi et al., 2022).
This paper suggests that attention should also be paid to how design initiatives could enhance the capability of care ecosystems to generate and integrate diverse and relevant resources to support individual recovery journeys better. In order to do so, we will first review the role of resources in mental healthcare transformation, their articulation within the service-dominant logic theory, and the recent understanding of care and service ecosystem design. This background will inform the developmental analysis and working model of Recovery Co-Lab, a territorial lab for mental health that illustrates how collective and collaborative design activities can explicitly address the emergence and integration of resources toward recovery-oriented mental healthcare.
Keywords: mental health, care ecosystem design, service ecosystem design, service design, resource integration
