Week 1: September 13
Territory exploration
Team: Laura Rodriguez, Katherine Herzog, Josh LeFevre, & Newell Khale
Project kick off! For this project, we will be exploring how we can design methods that enable people to materialize, visualize or externalize their own experiences of mental health.
We began this project by examining others in this space including Brendan Dawes’ “States of Mind” and Candy Chang’s “A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful.” While we were intrigued by the States of Mind project, one element we felt was missing was the ability to spark a meaningful conversation about the creations. This stemmed from the lack of identifiers for the images that were created. As a result, we wanted to be able to associate participant creations with an identifying word, e.g. an emotion. Chang’s project created a sense of community and encouraged conversation in a compelling way. This provided inspiration for our own publicly displayed collection that would have a similar result.
In addition to spurring conversation about the creations, we wanted to ensure that the creation process itself felt safe and helpful for participants. Creating a process that provides this, can be tricky. It was immediately clear from our group discussions and hearing from Viviana Ferrer-Medina in Carnegie Mellon University’s Counseling and Psychological Services, that allowing for anonymity, flexibility, and transparency in the process would be critical.
As a team, we performed a quick exercise to gain an understanding of the variety of ways different people may visualize emotions and mental health. Based on this quick exercise we decided to begin by exploring both 2D and 3D methods of visualization.
