Self, meaning, and culture in service design: Using a hermeneutic technique to design a residential service for adolescents with drug issues

This paper aims to contribute to a relatively untheorised and unresearched area of adolescent drug and alcohol literature—designing residential services. In a context in which the researcher was given the ‘hands on’ task of designing a model residential service for adolescents with drug issues in the Australian state of Tasmania, it explores techniques that might be useful to understanding and placing young people's views at the centre of service design. The paper begins with discussion of the international literature on residential service design for adolescents with drug issues, and the nature of a Tasmanian service design project. It then explores young Tasmanians’ idealisations of residential services needed for youth with drug issues. These young people offered their thoughts along five major dimensions of the operationalisation of a residential service: service mission, activities and programs, location of the service, nature of staff, and service rationale or benefits. Their comments were analysed using a hermeneutic technique exploring the ‘life-worlds’ suggested by their vision of the ideal residential service. Youth data are contrasted with the broad findings of interviews with adult professionals in Tasmanian youth services to question the assumptions implicit in research, policy and practice at the international level.