University of Westminster

Mental health, design, and wellbeing

This co-design workshop is a cross-disciplinary collaboration involving over 600 students and 40 colleagues per year from across six courses in the University of Westminster School of Architecture and Cities and BSc Medicine from Imperial College London.

Running since 2020-2021, the project explores the relationship between design, mental health, and wellbeing. It comprises of 60+ cross-disciplinary groups of students reflecting on four defined mental health conditions to identify problems and propose solutions for the design of existing NHS mental healthcare sites. Co-design offers an immersive and experimental learning experience and challenges the conventional pedagogy of designer-client and expert-user by introducing experts by experience.

Ambitious in scale and provocative, the ‘Mental Health, Design and Wellbeing’ co-design workshop taught everybody that a key part of being an architect, or a clinician is the ability to listen with care and work collaboratively.

Top 3 Learnings

1. We noticed a positive reframing of design – students seeing themselves as agents for positive change.
2. Our students designed to brief and to commission in a real-life scenario.
3. We witnessed knowledge exchange and co-design between two disciplines often at polars of the spectrum.