Our progress: Co-design in action

Over the past year Socialheads has worked with four Experience Haus student groups — one UX Design, two UI Design, and one Service Design cohort. Each team carried out its own research into the realities of social care and spoke to practitioners, young people, and sector leaders.

The results were strikingly consistent: every group independently confirmed that the same communication barriers keep reappearing — and that Socialheads needs to exist.

We’re grateful to Amit Patel and Murat Bayral for creating the partnership, and to Matt Adams, our Product Designer and Creative Lead, for guiding the design journey.

Highlights from co-design

• Protecting worker boundaries: Several teams explored features that prevent the blurring of personal and professional contact.
• Escalation design: Students prototyped ways to handle safeguarding alerts without disrupting workflows.
• Wellbeing: One group suggested subtle sound cues to help workers reset before meetings.

“Across four different courses, students found the same problems that social workers talk about daily. That kind of independent validation matters.”

This process has shown the power of co-design — not as a buzzword, but as a way to make digital tools safer, smarter, and genuinely useful. Each collaboration has deepened our understanding of what practitioners and young people need to stay connected safely.