Health research has long been considered solely an academic pursuit, and it’s extremely common for researchers to conduct their experiments without the contributions and feedback of the greater communities they study. This makes for both bad relationships and bad science.
Thankfully, a new research approach is starting to gain traction. Community-engaged research (CEnR) is a philosophy and set of research methods that aim to bring community partners into the research process, at any point from study design and implementation to analysis and dissemination.
However, since the approach is so new, there is very little infrastructure in place to help it take root and thrive.
The design process involved initial strategy sessions, followed by a user research discovery phase and three prototypes before our public release.
We partnered with the MICHR Community Engagement (CE) team for this work. The CE team’s overarching goal is to foster academic and community relationships for CEnR in all phases of the research process, but we wanted to focus our project on just one segment: the act of finding and creating connections.
Create and grow connections between community partners and academics statewide.