Nelly’s Healing Centre
Partners: Nelly’s Healing Centre, completed while at the UTS Design Innovation Research Centre (DIRC) in 2019-2020
Reciprocity, respect, responsibility
The aim of this project was to support the establishment of a healing centre for women in inner Sydney. The centre incorporates an intensive residential program and drop-in service for Aboriginal women and their children who are encountering the justice, health and child protection systems and may be battling abuse, mental health or other health and wellbeing issues.
The secondary aim was to provide the basis for a service model that is culturally embedded, human-centred, Aboriginal-led, genuinely healing for Aboriginal people, and can be applied in subsequent locations and future programs.
A key part of this work was to develop artefacts and documentation related to the Centre. Drawing on the Nelly's team's knowledge and experience, and DIRC's experience in research and design, the team are working together to create maps and visualisations that help the Nelly's team to envisage a person's journey through the Centre.
Our partnership with the Nelly’s team was formed on mutual respect, trust and reciprocity, and sought to reimagine what genuine partnerships look like between research, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and design. This was the focus of a presentation titled Telling Stories: Moving beyond empathy tools to reciprocity at ServDes 2020, a service design conference.
Below is a visual story created to illustrate the story of the partnership between the DIRC & Nelly’s teams, and its aims.
This was presented in early 2021 as part of ServDes 2020