Understanding Mental Health

Initial Sponsor Brief:

Creating audience-aligned data visualizations to help explore various aspects of mental health resources and content for community-engaged young adults.

My Role:

This was a group project and in the 14 weeks of the course I was working with different team members at each design stage. My role in this project started as a researcher with secondary research followed by research interview with expert. I facilitated research synthesis with my peers and co design session with the client. My final contribution was a data driven visualization to understand the creation of safe spaces.

Course:

Communication Design Workshop, 3rd Semester, Professor: Tomoko Ichikawa

Skills:

Tableau Visualization, Research Coding, Interface Prototyping and sketching.

Mental Health Journey based on Secondary Research

Sec Res_ Mental Health in Young Adults - Frame 1.jpg

“Our interviews indicated deriving strength from relationships, building trust, and authentic conversations are vital for a community that is supportive of mental health needs.”

“You think of all the different variables that make them the person that they are, and those are their culture, that's their gender, that's their race…And a lot of times, that's a lot of work"
- Expert

"They don't understand even the terminology or the fact that this is mental health, they just know that they have not been feeling good"
- Expert

“I think if we approach mental wellness in a way of trans culture and not subculture that you can provide the care and nurture that is needed without having to isolate the person that is having a mental wellness issues"
- Young Adult Volunteer

Insight synthesis

Social Works Project Board - Frame 9.jpg

Understanding the Relations

Social Works Project Board - Copy of Needs across scales (1).jpg

Pivoting, based on our research

How might we create a collection of visualizations that not only displays access to mental health facilities, but also serve as a medium to initiate conversations around mental health, thus reducing the stigma surrounding the topic?

CoDesign Session with SocialWorks

Deliverable Development

Final Output

My visualization on creating 'Safe Spaces' to develop a support infrastructure within the 'Social Circle'

Types of visualizations we explored

What Happened Next?

The client has decided to develop the visualization concepts and has put the catalogue in their website as a resource for their partners.

We have also sent the project for 'Core 77 Award' and are waiting for the results.

If you are interested in seeing the full catalogue, download it below.

DOWNLOAD

Takeaways:

I would like to be more aware of setting up team dynamics before going in for work, I changed teams at every stage and the relationships were being reset. Sometimes it took more time than usual to get comfortable with each other and the productivity levels were not as per my expectations.
The research process was generative and semi-structured, it helped us in exploring an unknow space like Mental Health, however it was very confusing. The lesson I took from my professor is to believe that we will figure it out in the end and till then keep the team spirit high and be as extensive as we can be.
If we had more time and connections, I would have run a co-design session with the prototypes and stakeholders to understand their prescriptive opinions.