Designing for wellbeing

dealing with psychiatric care in the first place. Needless to say, such an
environment opened up an array of questions that addressed the very
“craft” of design practices. The students had to look at the design practices
introspectively, and question whether the “business as usual” of design
still fitted. In this way, the environment of psychiatric care inspired the
design students and opened up opportunities to explore new approaches,
thereby developing new skills that were needed for this particular challenge.
It pushed the design students to question how to design in the context of
psychiatric care. It pushed them to explore the very methods of design.
This chapter aims to extend our understanding of the scenario as one of
the main methods available for design when dealing with psychiatric care.
Design as a form of storytelling and the designer as storyteller
Among the many methods of design, such as sketching, prototyping and
making diagrams, creating scenarios belongs to the core methods by which
a designer constructs their understanding of a problem or issue. At first, a
scenario is used to illustrate a concept, a solution or an artefact. In some
cases it may illustrate a benefit or prove a research finding. In its simplest
form, a scenario tells us how something works and supports the viability
of a particular artefact. But what if the design is not wholly concerned with
an artefact? What if the scenario is not there to prove the viability of some
design, but the viability depends on the design of the scenario itself? It is
clear from the students’ presentations, particularly in the example given
above, that the artefact shown in the particular scenario is not always
of primary interest. Some of the scenarios do not even exhibit a specific
artefact. And if they do, they do not require an in-depth introduction of its
particular design features, aesthetic qualities or technological capabilities
– that is not what interests us. This raises the question, if the artefact is
not our primary interest as designers, then what is our primary interest?
Design is unlikely to happen in isolation from non-design disciplines,
and it is hard to imagine design nowadays without the involvement of
76 · Designing wellbeing through storytelling