​Aishwarya Iyengar

Hospital to home was a 20- month project run by the Institute of Research and Innovation for Social Services (IRISS) to improve the experiences of older people going from hospital to home. This involved several co-design workshops with older people, informal carers and health & social care professionals across a period of 20 months. I was part of 3 of these co-design workshops and co-facilitating them with the IRISS design team.

Homeward Bound was conducted independently from the Hospital to Home project. As Homeward Bound ran in parallel with Hospital to Home, we benefitted to a great extent as we were able to compare different methods of research and design. 

Research for homeward bound involved one- to- one conversations, street interviews, small group discussions, casual chats at coffee houses and also detailed hour- long interviews with people. For the purpose of this project, it worked well as it gave people the confidence and the safe space to share their personal stories.

The co-design workshop took a contrasting approach for the purpose of bringing people at two ends of the spectrum to meet in the middle! By two ends here I mean the health and social care professionals on one end and older people and their families on the other. It was important to break away from systematic ways of working and come together to emapthise with one another and understand their values better.

Being actively part of the process gave us a wide range of methods to explore in engaging with people and learning about their life experiences that very well fed into our contribution “My life book”