Using Human-centered Design to Innovate Healthy Spaces for Families in Hartford

By: Annika Anderson, MPH and Jacquelyn M. Rose, MPH

Earlier this month, we had the opportunity to share the work we’ve been doing with the Connecticut Children’s Healthy Homes program at the Northeast Summit for Sustainable Built Environment (NESSBE). This biennial regional summit invites building professionals, owners, academics, policymakers, advocates, students, and others to engage in conversations about sustainability in the built environment. Organized by the Connecticut Green Building Council and Living Future Connecticut, the goal of this year’s summit was to explore the means and solutions to address sustainability, energy efficiency, and environmental justice in the built environment, lifting up Connecticut’s most vulnerable residents, while improving the quality of life for all residents.

In collaboration with Alba Cruz, Program Coordinator with Connecticut Children’s Healthy Homes Program, and Laura Marin-Ruiz, Program Business Consultant with Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health, we shared how Human-centered design (HCD) was leveraged to advance Building for Health, a strategy to help residents thrive in homes that are livable and promote well-being. Our primary goals for the session were to explain how HCD methodologies were leveraged to inform the design and implementation of Building for Health and to explore how HCD methodologies can be integrated into and benefit the work participants are leading.

Laura and Alba began the sessions by describing the original design and implementation of Building for Health (BfH), explaining that LISC-CT launched Building for Health in 2019 with support from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving. Under its original implementation, BfH functioned as a cross-sector referral system that leveraged a shared home assessment tool to identify a range of risks and needs within the home and connect residents to services. When the project ended, Connecticut Children’s Healthy Homes Program assumed administrative oversight, and in doing so, identified four key opportunity areas:

1) Define the innovation model, theory of change, and logic model;

2) Refine implementation of the innovation;

3) Articulate and demonstrate the innovation’s value proposition; and

4) Integrate community voice into the design, implementation, and evaluation of the innovation.

Laura and Alba proceeded to level-set Childhood Prosperity Lab’s role in addressing each of these opportunity areas. We (Annika and Jacquelyn) then introduced HCD as, “a way of thinking that places the people you are trying to serve and other important stakeholders at the center of the design, innovation, and implementation process,” according to Dalberg Design. As certified HCD practitioners, we leverage the LUMA System, which organizes design methods into three categories: Looking, understanding, and making which aim to observe the human experience; empathize and collaborate; and co-create, respectively.

After orienting participants to a brief introduction of the LUMA System, Annika proceeded to explain how we leveraged stakeholder interviews, a HCD method, to elicit key information from partners that informed the innovation model, theory of change, logic model, and key lessons learned from that activity. Annika layered this conversation with a description of the three co-design sessions we facilitated with the community that leveraged two HCD strategies: rose, thorn, bud and experience diagramming. Jacquelyn shared examples of the critical feedback and insights that resulted from the community co-design sessions, and feedback provided by the community regarding the utility and necessity of the sessions.

We concluded the session by engaging participants in two HCD activities that explore how they can integrate the methodologies into their work. The first was creative matrix, which prompted participants to identify one project they are currently working on and brainstorm as many ways as possible for them to engage the community (or the end-user) more strategically in the planning and design process. The second was visualize the vote, which helped them to identify and prioritize one idea to advance after the session.

During the discussion, participants noted there are a number of opportunities to better engage community and residents in the design and implementation of projects, as well as junctures where critical decisions need to be made. They also highlighted the disconnect between who is making key decisions about projects in the community, and began brainstorming potential strategies to bridge the disconnect. The engaging session left participants eager to explore how to better integrate resident and community voices into their work using HCD, with many indicating interest in ongoing communication and potential partnership.