Envisioning A Good Life
Visualising challenges and opportunities in the lives of people with complex support needs
People with disabilities who have complex support needs often don’t have the opportunity to make choices in their lives that most people take for granted. Instead, these decisions are made for them—by support workers, risk assessors, plan managers, government agencies and policy makers—and the way that these decisions are made has a profound effect on their lives.
A Good Life is a groundbreaking tool for visualising the lives of people with disabilities. It reframes conversations about support, shifting the focus to lived experience and revealing opportunities for people with disabilities to lead richer and fuller lives.
Seeing what life is like
A Good Life is an interactive web-based tool for creating and sharing visualisations of a person’s life. It provides a rich and clear understanding of a person’s lived experience and allows users to better understand the balance between cost, complexity, risk and quality of life.
Each visualisation depicts the activities that make up a person’s life, showing the time spent on each activity as well as the associated enjoyment, risk, cost or complexity. This rich visual overview is far more immediate and clear than impressions pieced together from shift notes, incident reports or support plans.
Seeing what’s possible
Viewers can interact with visualisations to see how someone’s life is affected when their support changes. They can create and edit activities as well as change whether specific activities happen or don’t. They can also adjust the priorities of decision makers to see which activities become possible and which don’t. These powerful interactive features allow support teams and policy makers to explore opportunities for people with high support needs to live a good life.
Understanding the context
Parallel Lines worked with disability support experts from Northcott Innovation and researchers from UTS School of Design to understand and visualise the complex landscape of disability support.
We spent almost two years talking with people with disabilities, support workers, service coordinators, quality and safeguarding assessors, financial managers and advocates for systemic change. We visited homes, reviewed documents, analysed policy and learned how decisions are made. Throughout this process, we developed maps and visualisations to explore concepts, systems and data.
This approach allowed us to identify important underlying tensions, such as the relationship between risk, cost and quality of life. From this, we learned that nuanced concepts like these have different meanings for different people.
A powerful tool for change
With its strong grounding in the realities of disability support, A Good Life is a powerful tool for impact at multiple levels:
Improving quality of life for people who rely on support services.
Training support teams to provide high quality, person-centred support.
Advocating for policy reform and driving cultural change.
The tool is designed for people with disabilities, but can be adapted to a wide range of contexts where complex decisions are made on behalf of other people, such as aged care, health and education. The project also demonstrates the powerful role that design can play in tackling complex social issues, equipping people with the knowledge to make meaningful change.
A life lived with disability is a life like any other, to be lived richly and well. By foregrounding the lived experience of people with disabilities, A Good Life encourages decision makers to make this belief a reality for the people they support.