Designing for Co-designing: The Case of Oral Health Promotion in Adolescents

In this chapter, we explore how research, service design, creativity, and innovation can be combined in co-creative innovation projects, including partnerships across sectors, using our ongoing project, #Care4YoungTeeth<3, as a case. In #Care4YoungTeeth<3, we conduct practice-oriented research and multidisciplinary collaboration among adolescents, dental health professionals, product designers, service designers, and researchers. The aim is to co-design oral-health-promoting interventions that enhance oral health among adolescents. Our methodology is grounded in a participatory research and design tradition that supports mutual learning, co-design, and shared decision making. The co-design process is intended to position stakeholders, i.e., adolescents, caregivers, professionals from oral health services and industry, and researchers, as co-creators, bringing their experiential and specialized expertise into play. By detailing our co-creative process through the lens of a research co-design framework, we provide insights into and reflections on the innovation approach. Our goal is to increase knowledge on preparing co-design processes and collaboration in healthcare, specifically oral health, which currently lacks case studies showing multidisciplinary design research partnerships and how they can help impact oral health.