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