Short Paper

Designing for informal services: A participatory approach to prevent sexual violence within a university

Please be aware that multiple presentations will take place during this session commencing at 10:30AM AEDT and share the same zoom link. Check how presentations are clustered in the program spreadsheet when adding the calendar.

Universities, alongside many other public and private organisations, are beginning to grapple with the issue of preventing sexual violence and providing effective services to survivors within their context. This article describes a unique participatory design-research project conducted to better understand staff and student perspectives of sexual violence within a university and how to better design services. One of the key findings of this research was the general distrust of formal services and reliance on informal services provided by both the organisation’s staff (employees) and students (users or customers). This provides unique insights into designing services for challenging social issues within an organisation and raises key questions about how service design can better support informal services and the co-production of services by employees and users.