The Gender HealthCare challenge: game design for health education
Creating literacy, fostering compassion and building skills for health professionals working with gender diverse youth through narrative gameplay.
Summer 2018 - Winter 2019
Skills
Design Research
Co-creation
Facilitation
Game Design
Objective
Create a game to teach health care workers about the experience of transgender and gender-diverse youth accessing hormone therapy within the BC health system informed by co-creation sessions with youth community members,
Commissioned as part of a health and ethics PhD.
Exploration
The researcher and I met to go through the details of their work thus far and explore design avenues for expressing their work and facilitating art/design sessions with transgender and gender-diverse youth participants. The researcher proposed a game as a vehicle for communicating their thesis findings to healthcare workers and after consideration we pursued the direction as a springboard.
Co-creation
This project focuses on providing channels for transgender and gender-diverse youth to express their experiences with accessing hormone therapy. I lead a game design co-creation session as part of a serious of art workshops in which the primary researcher's findings were condensed and presented as building blocks for co-creation.
"Playing this game should feel like oppression" -youth participant
A mockup of the game used in a presentation
Polishing
A key consideration was for the game to be able to evolve in the future, thus all materials had to be procured in small batches using materials easily sourced by my client and their partner organizations. The cards and rules also needed to be in formats supporting future editing and additions by the client, so we chose very accessible printing formats they would be able to access as needed.
Iteration
The outcomes from the co-creation sessions were iterated into a more cohesive interaction. After several rounds of iteration a prototype of the game was printed and went through user testing with a variety of healthcare workers and other stakeholders, which informed further iteration.
Outcomes and futures
Copies of the game reside with a number of hospitals, other health centres and community organizations around the province and are used as training tools with health professionals, adjacent workers and those providing support to transgender and gender-diverse youth.
The game was built with modularity and patterns in mind to allow it to be built out as needed to be more inclusive of the intersecting identities many people exist within, or entirely repurposed to education and compassion-building with other communities that struggle to access culturally relevant healthcare such as those who are disabled, indigenous or otherwise racialized, women and feminized people, or others.