Beyond the Archive podcast series for ORIGIN

This research seeks to build on a expand a pilot online platform (Ways of Being) developed in 2020. The platform hosts a series of human centred stories all based on artefacts found in museums, galleries and archives, and creates a virtual online museum.

The stories in the pilot were shown to have mental health benefits for young people age 16-24, particularly those from under-supported communities. The data from this pilot generated a conceptual framework of the story features that had most benefit.

In this programme of development we seek to under further understand the features of the stories, the user experience of the platform and the contexts in which young people might be using the platform, in order to co-design content that enhances the mental health benefits further. This will refine the conceptual framework from the pilot.

A team of young people with lived experienced of mental health challenges have been employed on the Lab4Living design team to create the story content guided by the conceptual framework

This podcast captures some of the work of this team of people; how they go about searching archives, finding stories, examples of those stories, how they consider ethical issues of reporting other peoples stories.

The podcast series has been Produced, Directed, Edited and Hosted by Sophie Cochrane-Powell, with a variety of guests each week, including other members of the team.

(This study/project is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) under its Programme Grants for Applied Research Programme (Ref: NIHR204148). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and contributor(s), and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.)