Co-designing for adolescent oral health: designers’ reflections from an interdisciplinary project

Designers typically collaborate across different disciplines. We wanted to explore what it has meant to work as designers in a project situated in healthcare. Our work is part of a four-year interdisciplinary project on adolescent oral health in Norway, where we worked with dental professionals, researchers, industry partners, a youth-focused non-profit organisation, and young people to support adolescents’ oral health habits. From four cases, we reflect on three themes: connecting with ourselves as designers in a new field, connecting with the field and participants, and connecting with partners across disciplines. Entering the dental health field meant learning new technical language and clinical routines while maintaining our own way of working. Recruiting adolescents, parents, and health professionals for co-design was challenging, and we learned that co-design can happen not only in workshops but through everyday conversations and youth arenas. Change ran in both directions: as we learned to work with the structured, evidence-based traditions of dental health, our partners took on iterative ways of working common in design - a mutual change that captures interdisciplinary collaboration realistically. From a single project in a Norwegian context, findings may not transfer directly elsewhere, but may help other teams working across design and health.