Using popular culture to enable health service co-design with young people

This paper reports on participatory service design with young people with type 1 diabetes – a long-term condition that can impact their emotional wellbeing and where poor self-care often leads to negative health consequences. The paper describes a project working with young people with type 1 diabetes to design innovative health services. The project consisted of eight creative workshops, in which we used popular cultural references as a means to create enjoyable activities and encourage the young people to engage with design. These cultural references can be understood as creating design language games that allowed the young people to understand and participate in the activities required at each stage of the design process. However, not all popular culture references worked equally well and this paper explores the reasons for this.