The WE-MIND consortium took part in a three-day workshop focused on co-designing a multilingual online mental health platform. The workshop was hosted by the Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto (ISCAP), one of the eight schools of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (P.PORTO), one of Portugal’s largest public higher education institutions.
The workshop brought together academic and technical staff, project coordinators, and students from all four WE-MIND Western Balkan partner institutions - RIT Kosovo, IBCM, SSST, and UNSA. As Milestone 6 of WP3, the workshop focused on jointly defining the content, functionalities, accessibility requirements, and user-experience principles of a multilingual mental health platform that will serve students in all four institutions.
Throughout the workshop, the ISCAP P.PORTO expert team - Dr. Sara de Sousa, Dr. Isabel Ardions, Dr. Ana Cláudia Rodrigues, Dr. Paula Carvalho, and Dr. Raquel Simões de Almeida - guided the Western Balkan partner institutions in developing a platform that is practical, useful, and easy for students to use. Together, they brought expertise in mental health and psychosocial rehabilitation, digital health and emerging healthcare technologies, educational innovation, and participatory approaches. Their guidance helped the partners turn the findings of the needs assessments conducted at the four institutions, together with the mental health toolkit developed during the WE-MIND workshop in Vienna, into clear priorities and practical design ideas for the platform.
Through collaborative discussions, benchmarking of existing platforms, World Café activities, and group design sessions, participants identified students’ main needs, prioritized platform features, and defined important functional and non-functional requirements. They also developed and reviewed initial mockups showing how students could access mental health information, resources, programmes, and support through the platform.
As in the Vienna workshop, students from the four Western Balkan partner institutions played a crucial role in the co-design process. Their perspectives directly shaped the platform priorities and design concepts. Student participation is central to WE-MIND’s bottom-up approach, with project activities and outcomes developed not only for students, but also with students. Their contributions have been an important part of all WE-MIND activities carried out so far.
The completion of the Porto workshop provided the consortium with agreed priorities, platform requirements, and initial design concepts that will guide the next stage of development. It moved the project from needs assessment and toolkit development toward the practical creation of an accessible, multilingual, and student-centred online mental health platform.
The WE-MIND Western Balkan partner institutions are grateful to the Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto (ISCAP), P. PORTO team for their warm welcome, excellent organisation, expert guidance, and valuable contribution to the successful completion of this important project milestone.
