Nudge: Family Stronger Together
Service Design · Wellbeing · Charity
Overview
KidsTime is a UK-based workshop programme that supports families where a parent lives with mental health challenges. Through drama, play, and conversation, it creates a safe environment for parents and children to explore mental health together and strengthen their connection.
Nudge was developed to address two recurring challenges: many workshop materials are one-off and often left behind or difficult to revisit after the session, while coordinators often have limited time to gather feedback or understand specific family needs. The solution introduces a co-creation-based materials pack and toolkit that families can continue using at home or in future workshops. It helps them recognise moments of progress, celebrate shared experiences, and carry their learning forward, while giving coordinators more consistent and timely insights to tailor support, adjust workshop content, and demonstrate the value of participation.
Role
Service Design, Design Research, Toolkit Design, Prototyping, Testing, Visual Design
Team
Individual Project
(Tutor: Cordula Friedlander)
Timeline
Jul 2023 — Nov 2023
Partner
KidsTime Tower Hamlets
Background
In recent decades, mental health awareness in the UK has grown significantly, with many organisations actively promoting related initiatives. However, according to the NHS Confederation, the system has become “a national emergency,” as services continue to struggle with the sharp rise in people seeking support after the pandemic. Among those affected, many are parents—highlighting the broader impact of mental health challenges on families and children, and reinforcing the need for supportive programmes like KidsTime.
Desk Research
Parental Mental Health and Child Wellbeing
Parental mental health issues can significantly affect a parent’s ability to care for their children, leading to difficulties in managing emotions, responding to children's needs, and setting appropriate boundaries. The stigma surrounding mental illness often brings shame and low self-esteem, which may discourage parents from acknowledging their condition, seeking help, or talking about it with their children. These uncertainties can have a profound impact on children, increasing their risk of behavioural, emotional, social, and educational challenges.
What Do Children Need
Access to accurate, age-appropriate information about parental mental illness helps children reduce misunderstandings, express themselves with the correct language, and adapt better. Family conversations about mental illness also give them space to voice fears about themselves and their parents, building coping strategies. Yet nearly half of parents choose to hide their condition from their children (Comic Relief, 2022), leaving many children without the clarity or reassurance these conversations can offer.
Primary Research
Expert Interview
To understand how parental mental illness affects children and how conversations and support systems can help, I focused my primary research on the KidsTime workshop model. I conducted nine interviews with four mental health practitioners, including two KidsTime coordinators, to explore the needs of children, ways to communicate mental health, and the workshop’s strengths and limitations from an expert perspective.
The interviews revealed key factors in supporting parent-child communication about mental health, while also highlighting KidsTime’s success as a support model for these families. Coordinators also shared challenges in broadening the workshop’s scope and engaging children across age groups, due to resource and operational constraints. In response, I refined my project direction to focus on specific design gaps within the KidsTime experience—developing targeted service interventions to support both families and coordinators.
Workshop Visits
To complement expert interviews, I attended KidsTime workshops in person to observe the overall flow and how families engaged throughout each session. This helped me identify moments where participants felt connected or disengaged, and uncover practical gaps that might not surface through conversation alone.
Workshop schedule — 2.5 hours total / held monthly
Challenges and Opportunities
By revisiting the expert interviews alongside insights from workshop visits and informal conversations, I mapped out key pain points for coordinators and participating families. This process helped clarify opportunities to introduce more sustainable tools, improve engagement, and better capture value across the KidsTime experience.
Workshop coordinators pain points
Limited time to collect feedback
The workshop’s tight schedule often pushes feedback to the very end, leaving little time for coordinators to collect meaningful input for improvement.
Difficulties in demonstrating workshop outcomes
Coordinators often rely on questionnaires to demonstrate workshop outcomes, but the data collected is limited. They hope to showcase families’ growth in more tangible, compelling ways.
Participating parents’ pain points
Worksheets collected are hard to organise
One-off materials are commonly used in story time or family discussions, but they’re hard to keep and organise, and often get lost after the session.
Younger children are less engaged
Younger children are sometimes easily distracted and less engaged during story time, which can make it harder for parents and families to participate meaningfully.
Key opportunities
Problem Statment
How might we build on existing elements of KidsTime to better engage children, help families capture their learning and growth, and give facilitators clearer insight into the programme's intangible outcomes?
Development
Concepts Exploration
To make the experience intuitive and enjoyable for adults and children, I explored gamified and co-creation-based formats that support reflection and learning documentation. I also studied the psychological impact of colours and shapes on emotions and behaviours, choosing visual elements that foster positivity while avoiding those that might trigger negative associations.
Prototyping and Testing
To test the feasibility and accessibility of my concept, I ran several workshops, online and in person, to observe how people interacted with the materials and instructions. I also gathered feedback from KidsTime coordinators to understand how the prototype could fit into the workshop flow.
Service
Nudge: Family Stronger Together
Nudge is a service designed to enrich KidsTime workshops by supporting participating families in documenting and reflecting on their experiences in a more engaging way. Through accessible tools and co-creation activities, Nudge empowers families to celebrate achievements, try new activities, and recognise how their learning in mental health improves their own wellbeing and strengthens parent-child relationships. Acting as both a reflection tool and a gentle daily reminder, Nudge encourages parents to acknowledge progress and build resilience, using colourful materials and interactive elements that captivate children and deepen their involvement.
Beyond its benefits to families, Nudge also supports coordinators by providing valuable insights into participants’ experiences. These insights help tailor future sessions, showcase engagement, and highlight the value created throughout the workshop journey. By making learning and growth more visible, Nudge fosters a safe, engaging environment where families can understand their progress and connect deeply with each other.
User: Participating Families
Learning Documenting Posters
A series of posters designed to help families document their learning, using the metaphor of flower growth to represent the gradual development of mental wellbeing. Parents and children can work together to capture their experiences and reflections by responding to prompts from coordinators on coloured paper, turning reflection into a shared visual process.
User: Participating Families
Activities Instruction Guide
I developed a step-by-step instruction guide to ensure participating families can easily follow the activity. On the reverse side, a layout template provides suggestions for what shapes to cut from coloured paper and how to arrange them, offering inspiration for those who may need visual cues to get started.
User: Workshop Coordinators
Activity Coordination and Material Guide
This coordination guide outlines the content, steps, and materials needed for each activity. It gives facilitators flexibility to adapt learning prompts and formats based on each session’s theme and group dynamic, helping them deliver a smoother, more responsive experience.
Using Scenario Storyboard
Final Showcase
Reflection
Although the project was not implemented in the workshop due to operational and financial constraints from the stakeholder organisation, it received encouraging feedback from both coordinators and managers. They acknowledged the design’s potential to address key pain points and enhance the overall experience. Given more time, I would continue developing the concept into a digital product—extending its use beyond workshops, making it part of daily routines, and reaching a broader audience.
Vulnerable Groups as the End Users
When designing for vulnerable groups, safeguarding must be embedded throughout the research and design process. It’s essential that gatekeepers fully understand the intent of each activity and that any concerns are addressed early. Additionally, language and used elements also require careful consideration, and collaborating closely with professionals from the start is crucial to assessing the feasibility and appropriateness of the content.
Service Design Through Design Futures
This project taught me that as designers, solving problems is not the only approach to tackling challenges. Sometimes, amplifying existing strengths within a system or organisation can be just as impactful. Building on these assets can lead to positive change without requiring extensive reform, and this perspective deepened my understanding of how service design can create meaningful shifts through small, strategic actions.