Co-designing a social innovation to better support people affected by cancer: A user-driven integration of societal resources

Paper in proceeding, 2018

The House of Power opened on February 8th, 2018 – the first Swedish support centre for people affected by cancer. The centre is located in the city of Borås (a mid-size Swedish municipality) with a 300 square meters venue to provide emotional, social, and practical support for people affected by cancer. The House of Power is a social innovation project initiated, driven, and designed by people affected by cancer. It is the result of a collaboration between patients, relatives, local hospital, primary care, municipality, Social insurance agency, Employment agency, academia, local businesses, and civil society. All of these actors are often involved in people’s life event of getting a cancer diagnosis, but the resources are fragmented and badly fitted for the person affected by cancer. With the ambition to act as a platform for relevant resources, The House of Power builds on the logic of user-driven resource integration. This work has been nominated for the Swedish Design Award 2018 in the category sustainable development. In this paper, we describe the design process and highlight some key learnings for the open and distributed co-creation process of this social innovation.