Company: J5 Design

Client: United Way of Calgary and Area

Country: Canada

In 2022, United Way of Calgary and Area commissioned our service design firm to contribute to an initiative that aims to improve the wellbeing of youth using an established 25-year prevention strategy, Planet Youth, in conjunction with their collaborator Miskanawah Community Services Association. Our challenge was to provide a co-design framework and facilitation to support the client to achieve their Indigenous youth engagement goals within the Planet Youth initiative.

We began the project by consulting with seven Indigenous Elders representing different tribes. Through this consultation, we saw an opportunity to accomplish the client’s goals while engaging appropriately with our Indigenous colleagues and youth through “Wellbeing Circles”. The circles were based on co-design methodology and followed a design lab approach moving through phases of empathy, problem definition, ideation, and prototyping.

The Wellbeing Circles were held with the intention to create the following outcomes with Indigenous youth:

1. Practice reconciliation through giving consideration for Indigenous youth to connect with Elders and their Indigenous culture,
2. Make it clear to youth when they were engaging in Western culture or Indigenous culture within the circles, and
3. Engage youth participants in exciting and engaging design activities to enable them to design the future of their own wellbeing through allowing them to communicate in ways that are most comfortable to them.

Our approach with this project required us to be flexible with our service design methodology. Throughout the project it was important to follow and be guided by Indigenous protocol, ceremony, and reflection, and to blend Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches. The prototypes that were developed were not explicitly products or services, rather they were representations of how the Indigenous youth wanted to find and maintain wellbeing for themselves and their community.

Service design in this case was about holding space for emergent change to happen without dictating what that change was going to be or the speed it would occur at. It was about being truly human-centered, being open to different cultural practices, and new definitions of innovation. The main impact of the Indigenous Youth Wellbeing Circles was that they were a catalyst for change for all who participated: they gave space for youth to be heard, for Youth Elders to gain confidence and connect to their own journeys of wellbeing, for Elders to pass on their wisdom, and for us, as service designers, to reframe our practice and embrace ambiguity in an entirely new way.