Unsure about embracing design thinking? TIIP Award winner Melissa Cox says, 'Just do it!'

February 21, 2025

Melissa Cox, PhD, has always believed in empowering community voices as a guiding principle for achieving health equity. After completing a master’s degree in public health, she worked in a rural district in South Carolina where she ran a teen health project that provided leadership tools, health knowledge and professional development opportunities to high school students. Working directly with the local community inspired a shift in how she thought about health access and led her to think about how intersecting identities drive health — for better or worse.

Dr. Melissa Cox

Passionate about the intersection of adolescent health and community outreach, Cox joined the health behavior doctoral program at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health to explore adolescent substance use prevention. More than eight years later, she is now an assistant professor in the Gillings School’s Department of Health Behavior. She contributes to important research on population-level impacts of alcohol use and develops innovative, adolescent-led strategies for reducing alcohol-related harms.

During her career journey, Cox realized that standard grant processes left little room for innovation in her research. Fortunately, a colleague shared information about Innovate Carolina’s Design and Innovation for the Public Good (DIPG) team and its Translating Innovative Ideas for the Public Good (TIIP) Award. DIPG supports projects that address “wicked problems” — challenges that are culturally and socially embedded, complex and pervasive, making them difficult to define and harder to solve.

Cox saw the TIIP award as an opportunity to address what she views as a wicked problem for young people today.

Alcohol use is “so deeply embedded in our social culture that it presents a unique challenge compared to other substances,” she says. “We know earlier life [experiences can] have long-term impacts, and alcohol drives harm because of the wide scope of use and the negative consequences associated with it.”

After applying and ultimately receiving a TIIP award, which provided $51,000 in funding support for her project, Cox was ready to move beyond linear approaches to problem solving. In support of her project, the DIPG team designed and conducted a series of design thinking workshops with young people to gain their perspective and insights into what a meaningful alcohol harm reduction intervention might look like.

Led by Liz Chen, PhD, associate professor of health behavior at the Gillings School and Innovate Carolina’s design thinking lead, and Jacinta Bailey, a design thinking and innovation fellow, the workshops with college-aged adults in Chapel Hill area aimed to drive the intervention process forward while remaining grounded in the voices, experiences, desires and stories of the young people at the center of the challenge.

“Innovate Carolina’s design thinking experts offered structure, a framework and a facilitation process to guide a more innovative approach,” says Cox. “The DIPG team has a level of expertise, but also a level of approachability to meet investigators and projects where they are and guide the process. That’s such a gift to this University; I don’t have to become trained in design thinking. We have experts to work with us.”

Students participate in a design thinking exercise at DIPG.

What surprised Cox most about the human-centered design approach was “how powerful creativity is at getting ideas flowing and harnessing that for intervention development.” The TIIP Award ultimately informed an unforeseen approach: a rigorous mobile health intervention for youth alcohol use prevention. The highlight for Cox and her research team was engaging directly with the people for whom they were designing.

“We were able to connect with them, meet them where they are, hear about where they are and learn from them,” she shares.

At its core, design thinking is about collaborating intentionally with the people a given product aims to serve, which can lead to the unexpected. For traditional researchers, the notion of embracing ambiguity and iteration seems at odds with most grant opportunities, for which the pressure to know the “right” answer often unintentionally stifles innovation. Throughout her engagement with the DIPG team, Cox saw the difference in the process of design thinking, which intentionally incorporates creativity and artistic approaches to move beyond linear thinking and expand what is possible.

“I think anybody who’s trained in the sciences and goes through formal education in general is just more rooted in a linear process. And so, it takes a little bit of encouragement to break out of that,”she says. “I think we got there with the students in the sessions, and when it happened  you could feel the energy shift and ideas coming forward.”

As a TIIP Award winner, Cox saw firsthand the value that creative problem-solving approaches like design thinking can offer to researchers. While acknowledging the hesitation many researchers feel when invited to design thinking workshops, her advice to colleagues on the fence about engaging is simple: “Just do it!”

“There’s no real risk — just gains to be made,” she emphasizes. “The DIPG team thinks in really different ways and can add an entirely new perspective, allowing space to deeply think about the project outside of linear models. You go through this process, and you’re going to get ideas that you hadn’t conceptualized before that can move a lot of different types of science forward.”

Join the TIIP Awards information session on Feb. 27 to learn more about the application process. 2025 applications will open on Feb. 24.

This story originally was written by Jacinta Bailey for Innovate Carolina.

Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.