Stefan Elbers

119 Co-designing relapse prevention strategies METHODS Design Weperformedanembedded single case study (Yin,2003), inwhichwe analysedandevaluated all co-design activities that were related to the development process of the SOLACE project. Throughout the study, the researchers followed a participatory action research (PAR) approach, which is characterized by active collaboration with the people of interest, rather than only researching them. PAR also emphasizes respectful cooperation between stakeholders and researchers including collective decision making and a bidirectional transfer of knowledge over multiple iterative development cycles (Foth & Axup, 2006; Seekins & White, 2013; White et al., 2004), which is in accordance with co-design methods (Howard & Somerville, 2014). During each cycle, insight is acquired through action (e.g., by letting patients interact with preliminary prototypes), empowerment of stakeholders (e.g., by patient involvement in co-design sessions), and subsequent reflection (Foth & Axup, 2006). Participants The SOLACE project consortium consisted of 2 interdisciplinary multimodal pain treatment centers, the Royal Dutch Society for Physical Therapy, The Dutch National Pain Patient Advocacy Organisation, and 4 research groups with a respective interest in chronic pain treatment (2 groups), co-design, and behavior change. All consortium partners assisted with the recruitment of participants when this was required at specific co-design activities, including patients and their spouses, HCPs, designers, researchers, and students. The core team was composed of 3 researchers, each from a different research group. This team was responsible for the planning and preparation of the co-design activities. To monitor overall progress, a steering committee was formed, which included representatives of all consortium partners. Ethical approval for this study was granted by the local ethics committee (Medical Research Ethics Committee Atrium 15-N-120). Materials Co-Design Methods. In interviews and co-creation sessions, the core team adopted various co-design methods, including generative techniques, contextual interviews, system mapping, and prototyping. These methods were adopted to facilitate stakeholder participation during key moments in the design process: generative techniques to elicit tacit knowledge and latent needs, contextual interviews to increase empathy, system mapping to develop a comprehensive overview of the acquired data, and prototyping to