Promoting Partnership and Impact through Implementation Science and Human-Centered Design: A Commentary on the Special Issue

Community partnerships are important for ensuring that school-based research produces knowledge to adequately support the mental health of students, families, and educators. The special issue on university–community partnerships for developing interventions contains an array of studies describing development of both interventions and implementation strategies. These articles have clear relevance to the fields of implementation science and human-centered design, which share similar objectives of promoting the adoption of new innovations. Both disciplines emphasize the adoption of new interventions, iteratively solve real-world problems, consider multiple perspectives, and ultimately focus on individual behavior change. This commentary focuses on the ways that the principles, frameworks, and methods of these two fields relate to one another, the special issue articles, and their orientation toward partnership-driven intervention and implementation strategy development.