Designing for wellbeing
Designing for wellbeing
Designing for wellbeing
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of the positive story of people helping at crucial moments in a patient’s life<br />
is as valuable as the perspective of agony, both the design and presentation<br />
of Vihrea muutos do not fare well in illustrating this. It was as if the design<br />
was trying to systematise these moments of significance, disregarding the<br />
actual particulars of these empathic moments as they occur. In the Vihrea<br />
muutos concept, both the elderly and the mentally ill are supposed to<br />
take care of plants and, by extension, each other. However, it is unclear on<br />
what stories the overall design of a public indoor green space was based<br />
on. Although this design tries to address stigma, it is questionable why the<br />
elderly and the mentally ill are put together. One gets the impression that<br />
they were not put together due to stigmatic reasons, but they were “mashed<br />
up” <strong>for</strong> the convenience of a solution that, by now, seems only remotely to<br />
address the positive story of the empathic encounter. As if both the elderly<br />
and the mentally ill were unutilised resources in society, <strong>for</strong> whom Vihreä<br />
muutos has now found a new purpose, culminating in a student’s statement:<br />
“And we can give them a new task in their life”. This was a design of bigger<br />
stories based on an ageing population and the rising costs of healthcare,<br />
which did not account <strong>for</strong> the smaller stories of individual lives.<br />
The role of design in telling stories<br />
I have stressed the significance of stories when designing <strong>for</strong> <strong>wellbeing</strong><br />
in psychiatric care. In particular, I have argued <strong>for</strong> a perspective with scenarios<br />
that look beyond the designed solution. The scenario is a story of<br />
need and, especially in the context of psychiatric care, a story of agony in<br />
which a solution or an artefact may play a role. By giving agony a voice, the<br />
scenario does not primarily illustrate a solution, but a problem, an issue,<br />
a lack, and with it the need <strong>for</strong> change. From this perspective, the solution<br />
and the technical elaboration are important only in so far as they play a<br />
role in expressing this problem and this need <strong>for</strong> change. A scenario unifies<br />
stories of need in a single plot or story, in which solutions, artefacts and<br />
technical details may play the role of plot devices in getting that story across.<br />
85 · <strong>Designing</strong> <strong>wellbeing</strong> through storytelling