Journeys and Voices Together: Using Participatory Design to Create Digital Stories for the Health and Well-Being of New Immigrant/Refugee Communities

• In Event: Participatory Art-Based Research Approaches

Abstract

1. Objectives: The goal of this study was to explore ways to integrate digital storytelling (DST) and the design process while collaborating with a local, multicultural community health organization to facilitate and advocate for health and well being of new immigrant and refugee communities based on a ‘social model’ of design practice and research. Community health brokers from ethnically diverse backgrounds were the participant stakeholders in DST workshops. Their participation, experience and knowledge of community health service led them to create digital stories (DSs) as information-sharing vehicles.

2. Perspective: Margolin and Margolin (2002) upholds that the foremost intent of social design is the satisfaction of human needs. Judith Gregory (2009) states that designers operate in multidisciplinary and in-between spaces so they can create design spaces for new kinds of participation and reciprocity. The frameworks of participatory design, action research and a social model of design explored in this context through digital storytelling are proposed for developing further insights into an integrative design practice in the social sphere which can create ‘stories of healing’ based on the journeys and voices of participant stakeholders.

3. Methods: The research process combined ethnographic methods, observation and shadowing techniques and participatory design into problem definition and identifying an area of design intervention. The participatory DST approach of creating artifacts (DSs) led to iterative cycles of feedback and evaluation from different communities of stakeholders and experts.
Stakeholder participation was invited from the beginning of this collaborative endeavor for locating the point of design intervention and the digital storytelling (DST) workshops offered the venue for shared communicational space.

4. Data sources: The project outcomes were the initial five digital stories and the resulting participatory action-based research (PADR) process model. The DST approach in this project was also a data source for the research. Data was collected in the form of focus group discussions, feed¬back forms and questionnaires in addition to semi-structured interview discussions with experts. The collected data was compiled and content was analysed to highlight recurrent themes.

5. Results: Workshop participants learned DST skills while collaborating to develop communica¬tion information; they focused on well being issues that were important to them and their communities. They reported that participation in the process was creative, empowering, pro-active and transformational. The audiences comprising of new immigrants and health brokers from MCHB shared that these kind of DSs can be an effective medium for sharing experiential information and can support for health advocacy. Expert feedback brought attention to the possibility of highlighting the long existing and emergent issues of the community through this explored process and these kind of artifacts. These co-created DSs will be interfaced through the community organization’s website.

6. Scholarly significance: Although the project focused on a participatory design process but it reveals to be situated at the boundaries of diverse disciplines. This exploratory research offered an opportunity to understand the role that the collaborative design process can play in interdisciplinary knowledge creation within the social sphere through participatory action-based practice while offering capacity-building venues.

Author

• Naureen Mumtaz, University of Alberta