Urban co-creation is an approach to urban design that actively involves stakeholders and end-users in the design process. As designers increasingly use digital tools to manage design information, stakeholders and residents may find it difficult to participate, resulting in a lack of engagement. The emergence of metaverse technologies offers a crucial opportunity to employ user-friendly and collaborative tools, enabling more effective participation. In the study presented in this article, a custom-designed digital game with virtual reality environment was used to facilitate a series of co-creation workshops. The study focused on changes in participants’ experience by comparing baseline and endline survey results against the design outputs. It employed a holistic framework considering four dimensions: game design, participatory experience, learning outcomes and co-creation results. The findings indicate that the digitally gamified approach helped enhance participation and knowledge sharing, and even though game design ratings varied, the use of video games motivated engagement, particularly in an intergenerational context. The co-creation workshop design documented in this article offers new methods to enhance community engagement in urban design. Especially during digital transformation, it opens renewed discussions on balancing traditional output-driven approaches with more participant-centric methods and design objectives.

Empowering the Participant Voice (EPV) is an NCATS-funded six-CTSA collaboration to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate a low-cost infrastructure for collecting timely feedback from research participants, fostering trust, and providing data for improving clinical translational research. EPV leverages the validated Research Participant Perception Survey (RPPS) and the popular REDCap electronic data-capture platform. This report describes the development of infrastructure designed to overcome identified institutional barriers to routinely collecting participant feedback using RPPS and demonstration use cases. Sites engaged local stakeholders iteratively, incorporating feedback about anticipated value and potential concerns into project design. The team defined common standards and operations, developed software, and produced a detailed planning and implementation Guide. By May 2023, 2,575 participants diverse in age, race, ethnicity, and sex had responded to approximately 13,850 survey invitations (18.6%); 29% of responses included free-text comments. EPV infrastructure enabled sites to routinely access local and multi-site research participant experience data on an interactive analytics dashboard. The EPV learning collaborative continues to test initiatives to improve survey reach and optimize infrastructure and process. Broad uptake of EPV will expand the evidence base, enable hypothesis generation, and drive research-on-research locally and nationally to enhance the clinical research enterprise.

Although individual cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis (CBTp) is a recommended treatment in the UK, studies evaluating participant experiences are limited, particularly in high-security (HS) conditions. Traditional methods of participant evaluation disadvantage HS patients. Individual chief-complaint orientated CBTp (C-Co CBTp), a variant of CBTp, is offered in a HS setting. The paper aimed first, to evaluate participant experiences of individual C-Co CBTp within HS conditions, and second, to evaluate collaborative group game design as a means of evaluating participants’ experiences. Collaborative group game design was used as a novel method of participatory action research to evaluate patient and practitioner experiences of C-Co CBTp. Fifteen participants (10 inpatients, five staff) developed a life-size game representing their experiences of C-Co CBTp and offered feedback on the process. The game comprised of 24 squares, each depicting and describing a therapy experience, and a set of game-play cards. Collaborative group game design is a viable means of evaluating participant experiences. Findings corroborate and add to the current evaluation literature. Participants placed particular emphasis on collaboration, the therapeutic relationship, therapy as a nonlinear process and vulnerability and hope.