I’m a service designer with experience as project manager, design strategist and design researcher. I co-founded BASED design studio (https://based.design/) specialized in digital transformation for B2B and B2C products in Taiwan with my background in public relations. I enjoy work on social innovation and creative projects that brings the impact to our society.
Check out my works (http://yitzu.squarespace.com/) and get in touch with me to discuss your ideas!
My experience in working with local authorities, non-profit organizations and start-ups has taught me that my passion is to deliver the real voice of the user and collaborate with different kinds of partners to build the human-centric design by utilizing all kinds of resource.
My favorite spirit is to “Build things together.” I enjoy the process of collaborating with stakeholders, users and design team to find the possibilities in design through interviews, facilitating workshops and learn from the each other. I strive to collaborate with different parties to support the design team to have a wider understanding of the user.
My goal is to connect inspirations and find the best way to build good services.
Mobilise is the platform aimed at creating “a little mind space” in everyday caring life. Unlike the present scattered and disconnected services, Mobilise provides seamless onboarding experience and personalised services for unpaid carers through community-based cross-sectoral collaboration.
Project Partner: Mobilise Care Ltd.
In Collaboration with: Kenjiro Taniguchi
Are you an “unpaid carer” who looks after family members, friends or neighbours because of their aging, long-term illness or disabilities without getting paid? There are 13 million unpaid carers in the UK providing invaluable support for their loved-ones. It is estimated that 1 in 3 of us will be an unpaid carer at some point in our lives.
Looking after a loved-one is invaluable, but it can also be hard. Mobilise supports your love-based choice of taking up such a precious role by providing “a little mind space” in caring life through integrated personalised services, peer-, professional- and family-supports, and carer-centred onboarding mechanism.
Looking after oneself is always beneficial for mental wellbeing, but our in-depth interviews revealed that it is challenging for people with caring roles to take time to do that. One carer described her life as if she was running on a hamster-wheel.
Because of their love for their loved-ones, people with caring roles tend to devote themselves so much when looking after the cared-for person, and prioritise caring responsibilities over their own wellbeing, which not only harms their mental health, but also puts their loved-ones at risk.
Mobilise makes caring activities easier by providing integrated services to find and manage information. It also provides the environment easily and confidently to receive help by other carers and family members. Not only can Mobilise squeeze their caring activities to create space, but also creates opportunities and environments to nudge carers to have their own space.
Carer-centred onboarding experience
A huge challenge for supporting carers is that they don’t reach out to carer-support until they recognise themselves as a carer. We found that most people don’t think of themselves as a carer, but as a partner, a parent, a child, a friend or a neighbor.
It is said that it takes up to two years of their caring role before they even recognise their additional responsibilities. As a result, what typically happens is that when the carers reach out to carer-support, they are already reaching very close to the crisis point.
Mobilise changes the situation itself where carers need to think of themselves as a carer to get support by integrating patient-support services within the platform. Through using the services to support their loved-ones, carers can start using the carer-support service without a self-recognition of being a carer, which helps them care for their loved ones better in the long run.
Cross-sectoral collaboration
During the research, we figured out that there are gaps between the carer-support sector and other healthcare and social care sectors. In a sense that the main focus of the carer-support service providers is carer, and that of the health and social care service providers is cared-for. Carers behind the cared-for person often feel neglected by the healthcare sector, even though carers are the one contacting them in most cases.
By putting carers at the centre, we integrated services from these two sectors together on the same platform, so that carers do not have to wander around in the flood of information that is scattered around.
The platform is aimed at creating “a little mind space” for carers, but it does not stop there. The bigger objective for the project is to redesign the agency of people with caring responsibility.
We heard many stories from carers that they want to pursue their individual goals whether in their academic achievements, professional ambitions, or hobbies that they are good at, but they had to put them on hold because of the additional caring responsibility. “Carer” should not be a label, a name of a person, nor a category of the population. “Caring” is a role that everyone might take up in our lives, which has a significant impact on every other aspect of life.
Through this platform, we would like to support their love-based choice of taking up such a precious role and assist them in pursuing their life.
