Designing at the Speed of Community
A community development hub for Healthy Aging
Assisted Living Alberta set out to create a digital Community Development Hub that would connect older adults, community organizations, volunteers, and local leaders across the province. The ambition was not simply to build another platform, but to help communities share their knowledge, learn from one another, and take collective action to support healthy aging.
J5 designed a community-led process that brought together service design, co-design, Asset-Based Community Development, agile development, and AI-enabled prototyping. By involving older adults as decision makers from early discovery through validation, we helped create an implementation-ready concept grounded in community strengths, relationships, and real-world experience.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
CLIENT
Assisted Living Alberta
WHY IT MATTERS
Communities across Alberta are already developing creative ways to help people age well, but their knowledge, relationships, and resources are often fragmented across geographically dispersed initiatives.
The Community Development Hub was designed to turn those individual efforts into a province-wide learning network. Instead of treating older adults as passive recipients of services, the process recognized them as community builders, knowledge holders, and essential partners in creating healthier, more connected places to age.
PROCESS HIGHLIGHTS
More than 80 sponsors, practitioners, community leaders, and older adults contributed over 130 hours of direct input, establishing a shared vision and remaining engaged throughout the co-design process.
Across eight iterative design cycles, we created and tested ten interactive prototypes, generating 260 individual feedback opportunities and achieving an average confidence score of 81% in the final concept.
Impact
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Resident Level
Older adults were involved as co-designers and decision makers throughout the process, ensuring the Hub reflected how communities actually connect, learn, and take action.
Higher fidelity web prototypes made emerging ideas tangible and accessible, including for participants with lower digital confidence, enabling more meaningful feedback and informed decisions.
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Community Level
The Hub was designed to help local organizations, volunteers, and community leaders share practical knowledge, learn from approaches being tested elsewhere, and strengthen their collective capacity.
Five validated use cases and a community-led governance model created a foundation for ongoing participation, contribution, and shared stewardship beyond implementation.
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System Level
The project produced an implementation ready platform concept, governance structure, Development Story Map, and working prototype code to support a smoother transition from design into development.
The process also created a network of community champions and strengthened internal capability across the sponsoring organizations, helping community-led design continue after the initial project was complete.