This project explores how we can design and sustain digital environments for informal and preventive mental health support, grounded in public values.
Together with care organisations, designers and societal partners, we develop and test methods that go beyond building an app or platform—towards designing an entire stack: from technology and user experience to community stewardship and governance. The project is guided by the following main question: How can public values be embedded in an integrated way—using validated methods—within a co-creative design process for societal technology applications?
Key sub-questions include:
- Which stack orchestration methods enable stakeholders and designers to define public values together and embed them coherently across all layers of a stack?
- Which methods enable public values to be translated into design choices in a traceable and accountable way, and how can these choices be validated?
The challenge
Mental health is under increasing pressure and the demand for specialised care is rising, while capacity remains structurally insufficient. A sustainable response requires a shift towards informal and preventive care, where people with lived experience and their networks—when properly supported—can help one another and strengthen resilience. Digital technology can play a key role here: online environments can combine reliable information with safe spaces for peer support and community building.
However, this is exactly where things often fall short. Many existing solutions are (partly) commercial and do not adequately safeguard privacy, agency, inclusivity, reliability and transparency. An integrated approach to embedding such public values throughout design, management and decision-making is still missing.
Our approach
We treat societal technology applications as a stack of interconnected layers that must be designed together. For lasting impact, it is not enough to design features; how a community is hosted and how organisations collaborate also determines whether public values are truly upheld. That is why we work on a co-creative design process in which stakeholders define public values together and then translate them coherently and systematically into choices across all layers of the stack:
- Applications, UX & Tech: reliable information and peer-support functions
- Social and organisational protocols: community stewardship and safe practices
- Governance structures: collaboration, decision-making and quality assurance between involved (care) organisations
A key question in the project is how this process can remain effective over time. Values, technologies and social practices change; the design and stewardship of the stack must therefore be able to adapt and be periodically revisited.
Our contribution to the approach
This project addresses a knowledge gap. Value-driven design approaches help to articulate public values, but there is still insufficient knowledge on how to implement those values in a validated and integrated way across a whole stack—spanning technology, organisational practice and governance—and how to do this in co-creation with all stakeholders.
We therefore develop two interconnected Key Enabling Methodologies (KEMs):
- KEM ‘Stack Orchestration’ (System Change)
A process approach to embedding public values in an integrated way, in co-creation with stakeholders, across the design of online environments—including stewardship and governance. - KEM ‘Values Validation’ (Ethics & Responsibility)
Methods to translate abstract public values into concrete design choices that are traceable and accountable—and to substantiate, test and safeguard those choices.
The insights are relevant beyond mental health. Other domains—such as libraries, cultural institutions, public broadcasters and neighbourhood communities—also need digital environments (and associated roles and governance structures) in which public values are structurally embedded.
The plan
Over the coming period, we will develop an initial framework with our partners and translate it into an actionable methodology. We will test the approach in mental health practice and translate the results into tools and guidance that support both designers and organisations in developing societal technology applications.
Intended outcomes include:
practical tools for the creative industries and for organisations that want greater agency as stakeholders and commissioners of responsible, value-driven digital design.
an integrated process approach for designing a public-values-driven mental health support stack;
validated methods for translating values into design and governance choices;