Healing Design Jams

Solving the problem of healing alone by working together

Given that it's not possible to heal alone, a natural starting point for us was to come up with a process for working together. These are our Healing Design Jams — effectively, a 2-3 day research & development incubator of scientists, healing professionals, designers, artists, and more, working together to produce healing resources for others.

Each of the Healing Design Jams has produced 4-6 healing artifacts, one of which has been turned into our first product prototype. Importantly, participants report this process is healing in and of itself!

Design Jams 101

We've made a few meaningful innovations to a typical design jam, creating a new collaborative process that is interdisciplinary, evidence-based, and story-informed.

Design jams are models for complex problem-solving in teams. Together, small groups explore a context, develop insights, create solutions, and test their ideas with intended users...all in a short amount of time. Design jams follow alternating cycles of exploration, execution, and reflection.

We think this model is a good baseline for co-creative work. And we had a counterintuitive hunch — that, with a few tweaks, a rapid collaborative process can also build a foundation for vulnerability, trust, and care!

Jam Participants

Our Healing Design Jams bring in experts from relevant fields, who can help us build from knowledge and fill in the gaps of what's missing from our public landscape of healing.

Participants are skilled in evidence-based methodologies [the science of healing]; art & storytelling [the stories of healing]; or design & product [the infrastructures of healing].

For many, this is their first time creatively building with people from other fields. Participants in our first Healing Design Jam included science researchers, clinical psychologists, social workers, therapists, faith leaders, interaction designers, service designers, UX designers, filmmakers, poets, musicians, & writers!

The Participants

Inside a Jam

See some of the exciting things we've been uncovering...

Outcomes

Each Healing Design Jam produces 4-6 brand new, co-created, evidence-based, interdisciplinary ideas for resources that can meaningfully help people connect to each other & themselves in the journey of healing.

Can you imagine...

(1) public art installations for people experiencing grief?
(2) community “healing trucks” for post-conflict neighborhoods?
(3) digital "potlucks" for death and grieving?
(4) audio storytelling journals for sharing stories of healing?
(5) ... and more?
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After every Healing Design Jam, our team builds an MVP prototype of one idea, testing the product with our network and relevant cohorts and providing feedback to the originating team. Check out "First Prototype" to see more.

Healing is a Process ... and this Process is Healing

Not just what we build, but how we build it.

Meta-Level Prototype — Healing While We Build
Design jams challenge the conventional wisdom that people require extended time and space to access vulnerability, experience growth, manage uncertainty, and build trust.

Instead, they suggest something else: That trust and meaning can develop rapidly at an individual and a group level, if given thoughtful facilitation and constraints!

Our Healing Design Jams take this one step further — suggesting that healing can also happen within these conditions.
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We see an opportunity to adapt the design jam model into a meta-level prototype — a creative, collaborative process that supports healing through what we build and how we build it.

Community of Practice — Skin in the Game
Every participant in our Healing Design Jam gets a rare chance to show up as instructor, student, peer, and whole person, all at once.

Our cross-disciplinary jam model provides a foundation of knowledge and an interdisciplinary community network of experts(!) who we can return to for healing projects in the future.

Every participant also has a personal relationship with loss and healing. This allows them to speak and build not just from domain knowledge but from lived, intuitive experience.

For many participants, this is their first time bringing both forms of expertise — personal and domain — to a creative setting. Participants in our jams get the chance to relate to their own losses creatively, and put their lived wisdom "to use" in service of others.

This helps us build for impact, with skin in the game.

Network Effects
The potential network effects of our Healing Design Jams are exponential. In our first jam, every (1) individual:

- Experienced 8+ dedicated, meaningful 1:1 interactions
- Heard & engaged deeply with 2+ personal stories from others
- Shared a deeply personal story with 2+ others
- Built 1 new creative project, informed by interdisciplinary expertise & diverse lived experience from 4+ others
- Thoughtfully engaged with and offered feedback on 2 additional projects (informed by 8-10 others)

Taken together, each Healing Design Jam produces:
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- 4-6 new healing artifacts solving for well-being
‍- 160 meaningful 1:1 interactions
- 40 instances of personal stories heard & engaged with
- 80 co-creative, solution-oriented interactions
- 40 engagements with evidence-based, experience-informed, interdisciplinary, creative healing ideas

...And all this value from one workshop!