Week 20

I started off the week by looking at projects which are based on improving people's mental health. I hoped that studying pre-exisiting mental health products could spark some further avenues that I could explore to strengthen my booklet.

Mindnosis by Sara Lopez Ibanez

Sara’s Mindnosis kit, allows users to discover the type of help they need, and where they can get it from. It includes a set of eight activity cards that combine mindfulness, cognitive behaviour therapy techniques (CBT) and tips from peers to help users when they feel unwell.

Tools for Therapy by Nicolette Bodewes

Nicolette Bodewes also designed a mental health toolkit, intended to help users express their thoughts during psychotherapy sessions.

The idea similarly stemmed from Bodewes' own experiences with therapy, where she the found creative sessions more beneficial than standard, talk-based therapy.

Tools for Therapy features a basic set of building blocks as well as a set of 12 more complex objects, based on the Jungian Archetypes defined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Other elements include round sheets of paper and a workbook.

Calmingstone by Ramon Telfer

At a loss of finding a tangible product on the market to help him with his own anxiety, Ramon Telfer worked with Calmingstone co-founder Alex Johnson to develop a hand-held device that eases anxiety through the use of light and sound.

As the pebble-shaped device sits in the palm of the hand, a copper ring sensor running around its edge senses the user's heart rate, and mimics it with a softly glowing light and a slight pulsing sensation.

"Because stress is very real and life is a fully tactile, sensory experience, we have created and evolved our learnings into a beautiful, intimate product that anyone can hold, feel and listen to," said the industrial designer.

Emotional First Aid Kit by Rui Sun

Graduate designer Rui Sun created an Emotional First Aid Kit, comprised of five objects designed to provide comfort in times of mental distress. The project aims to demonstrate that our emotional wellbeing is just as important as our physical health.

Each of the objects are intended to comfort the user in a particular way – the Purple Breathing Mask gives off calming scents when the user breathes in, allowing them to clear their mind when in overwhelming situations, and the Green Meditating Stethoscope helps stressed users tune into their breath and meditate.

I really recognised with Sara's project, as mine doesn't necessarily need the help of a therapist and there will be multiple sections to it like recognising you have a problem to treatment plans etc.

Book binding

I have been thinking about how I would bind my book for several weeks now. As the idea of my book was that the CBT element could be detachable this created an obstacle to overcome. I have looked at traditional ways in which journals and planners are bound together and there are the obvious ones such as ring bounded or glued together but I still could not work out how the user would be able to add additional pages. I have chosen to have the option of adding the CBT sections because I have learned through my research that relapses can happen unexpectedly. I want the resources of the 7-week extreme CBT period to the available in times when a therapist or further help is not.

By making up some quick prototypes I was able to identify possible solutions. Firstly, I experimented with a pre-established ring binder and clips. It was great that it allowed flexibility, but this created the attached pages to have greater length than the rest of the book. It would also be difficult to reduce the page size as the book is already A5 so it would be too small for the necessary content. It is also a bit fiddly; the user would have to de-attach two segments to release the pages. I want a simpler and sleeker solution than this. The results are below:

I then trailed origami; this is the option which I felt was best fitted. I folded paper to create a page holder. The CBT pages could come separately from the rest of the booklet, held in said holder then attached through a clip when needed. The holder can be transported daily to move in time with the booklet. The clip can also double as a bookmark. I have shown the process through the pictures and video below.

As my aesthetical theme is Japanese culture, I came across stab stitching, I think it will be a great way to bring the book together and the overall look of it will work well with the theme. After prototyping it I am not sure if this will be a durable solution, but an option is to manipulate the look but bind it in an alternative way.

I done some light reading on how the brain works. ‘The Little Book of Psychology’ by Emily Ralls and Caroline Riggs, this book gives good insights into how the brain processes thoughts and feelings but also psychology theories about how humans childhood experiences affect their future. They speak about experiments which were done on babies and animals based on behavioural development. The babies were shown a picture of a white rabbit but at the same time were exposed to a loud bang, this gave them a fright. Prior to that on several occasions they were shown another white rabbit to see if they have developed a phobia from the past test. There were also a lot of other experiments undertook, these were vital for psychologists to understand the human brain. It is extremely common for people who have experiences childhood trauma to develop a mental health illness, this is an interesting point for my everlasting research.

I also spent this week looking over my blogs, this was such a time-consuming task but an important element of the module. It is extremely time consuming hence why it was one of my vegetables in week 18. It would be much easier if I were to update it regularly but it’s just getting it done is the issue but that will change from now on.