Materialising Mental Health: Design approaches for creative engagement with intangible experience
Can creative methods drawn from design research practice be leveraged to help people think about, express and discuss their own mental health? Tackling communication hurdles around mental health is a societal challenge which creative methods of inquiry are well placed to address. Where verbal expres...
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Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | Can creative methods drawn from design research practice be leveraged to help people think about, express and discuss their own mental health? Tackling communication hurdles around mental health is a societal challenge which creative methods of inquiry are well placed to address. Where verbal expression alone fails, the affordances of multisensory tools and artefacts have the potential to provide a language for expression, discussion and peer support, and to create collective pictures of a community's mental health. In this chapter, we introduce a multifaceted exploration of how mental health issues can be materialised in individual and group contexts. Personalised Potions, Empathy Rock Garden, Emotional Modelling and Lexicon of Feelings are four 'making' activities developed and facilitated by students at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA. Each activity takes a unique approach to materialising emotions, using different material qualities and facilitation techniques. These approaches enable varying levels of anonymity, synchronicity and collaboration, but are united in their ability to create a safe space for externalisation of complex internal emotions. Our approach is centred on exploring participants' making activities and the artefacts emerging. While acts of making may have therapeutic properties, our main interest is in observing the patterns, themes, metaphors and material mappings which are produced.
This chapter introduces a multifaceted exploration of how mental health issues can be materialised in individual and group contexts. It focuses on developing methods for tackling communication hurdles around mental health in an academic environment, but also explore how these methods might work in a public-facing setting. Personalised Potions set out to materialise mental health by asking participants to express what they feel, but in a playful and indirect way - asking what qualities they believe they need. The facilitator asked them to create an 'activation' phrase for the potion: like any good potion, it doesn't work without a phrase or an action to set it off. The activity was free-form and individualised in the chosen subject. Participants could use the activity to address whatever aspect of their own mental health that they choose, however big or small. Participants required less instruction and showed an eagerness to start building much more quickly than in previous trials. |
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DOI: | 10.4324/9781003126508-2 |