Abstract
The opioid epidemic has been declared a health emergency in the US. This crisis has been addressed from multiple perspectives and by different stakeholders, like communities that have participated in self-organizing and mobilizing to fight back the crisis from a bottom-up approach. Community-led initiatives have been fundamental in tackling the opioid epidemic with education, service linkage, and distributing Naloxone, an overdose-reversing medicine. They are also the perfect space for social innovation because they can strengthen social relationships, however, little has been written about the role of Design in these organizations. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of community-led initiatives tackling the opioid crisis, an assessment of their strategies of action, and the presence of Design. Finally, we discuss 3 of the gaps in the practice where design can generate impact and offer means of innovation.
Keywords
community-led initiatives, opioid epidemic, social innovation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.468
Citation
Ramirez-Loaiza, S., and Rebola, C. (2022) Systematic review of community-led initiatives fighting the opioid crisis and opportunities for design, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.468
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Systematic review of community-led initiatives fighting the opioid crisis and opportunities for design
The opioid epidemic has been declared a health emergency in the US. This crisis has been addressed from multiple perspectives and by different stakeholders, like communities that have participated in self-organizing and mobilizing to fight back the crisis from a bottom-up approach. Community-led initiatives have been fundamental in tackling the opioid epidemic with education, service linkage, and distributing Naloxone, an overdose-reversing medicine. They are also the perfect space for social innovation because they can strengthen social relationships, however, little has been written about the role of Design in these organizations. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of community-led initiatives tackling the opioid crisis, an assessment of their strategies of action, and the presence of Design. Finally, we discuss 3 of the gaps in the practice where design can generate impact and offer means of innovation.