Creating libraries for systems change, one pattern at a time

From the site
The Design Patterns for Mental Health project recently launched, and it’s a great example of something with the seeds to grow into more of a behavior change for how we design more empathetically in the future with mental well being in mind.  While strictly for digital health, I can see implications for this across the design professions too, as we think about online and offline examples where one’s mental health hasn’t been a consideration. As someone who explored this topic using more tangible and less digital work objects, I’m now wondering how we can design for physical products that also consider design patterns. Some of these can extend very easily into the offline world, too.  This is also interesting not only for the core work of the site, but the collaboration infrastructure of partners. Making multi-stakeholder engagements like this work well would make an interesting case study, too. I wonder how we can extend these design patterns when there are multiple pattern libraries available – such as in the case with ethical AI design and mental health. How might we balance these multiple frameworks and libraries and understand how to embed these, and how might we also change the tools we use to address these.  While the Design Patterns project was created using a service design based approach, I’m curious how we can embed this work more into a day-to-day way of designing without depending on designers to remember these.  Is it a browser plugin that uses AI to sense where a better pattern could be used? Is it something within Sketch itself, one of my favorite tools because of its openness to innovation and product evolution through the use of plugins without needing it to be built in the browser and ‘sensed’? How can we embed these into how we design, and what needs to evolve to do so?

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