School of Architecture + Cities wins Research and Education Award for ‘Mental Health, Design and Wellbeing: A Co-Design Workshop’

The Co-Design Workshop is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Imperial College Medical School and the School of Architecture + Cities, which explores the relationship between design, mental health and wellbeing. The collaboration involved over 600 students from across six courses including Architecture BA Honours, Architecture & Environmental Design BSc Honours, Interior Architecture BA Honours, Architectural Technology BSc Honours, Master of Architecture (MArch) (RIBA Pt II) from the University of Westminster, and BSc Medicine from Imperial College London. 

Over 40 colleagues from Westminster and Imperial College London also took part in the workshop. Co-design offers an immersive and experimental learning experience and challenges the conventional pedagogy of designer-client and expert-user by introducing experts by experience. This innovative project comprised of two one-day co-design workshops, during which 64 cross-disciplinary groups of students reflected on four defined mental health conditions to identify problems and propose solutions for the design existing NHS mental healthcare sites.

The workshops were designed as a series of tangible tasks that stimulated discussion and restated the importance of ‘hands-on skills’ in both Medicine and Architecture. These included asking groups to create word clouds of what co-production meant to them, image-mapping emotional responses onto different sites, and representing in modelling clay what an ideal mental healthcare space should smell, feel, sound and taste like.

The discussions these activities generated were summarised into a ‘user brief’ at the end of the first workshop, and then underpinned a design poster made in the second workshop, illustrating students’ creative response to the brief. Both workshops involved keynote speakers, interviews with clinicians, patients, carers and other service users, as well as a live Q&A panels offering feedback from architects, clinicians and patient advocates.

Ambitious in scale and provocative, the Mental Health, Design and Wellbeing: Co-design Workshop taught everybody that a key part of being an architect or a clinician is the ability to listen with care and work collaboratively.

Alison Carrillo Culqui, a Westminster Interior Architect student and workshop participant, commented on the award: “It was an eyeopener to work with medical students on design in mental health and it is fantastic to have the workshop recognised in this award.” 

Dr Ro Spankie, Assistant Head of School of Architecture and Cities, said: “We were delighted to win the ‘Research and Education Award’ at the Design in Mental Health Awards. We have delivered the Co-Design Workshop for two years now – both online and in the architecture studios - and in that time over 1200 staff and students have been involved – that’s a lot of people who will be pleased!” 

Find out more about Architecture, Interiors and Urban Design courses at the University of Westminster.