Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium judy ko

Today, there are more questions than answers in looking at design therapy, which I’ll more specifically define as design thinking in soul care. Psychology has had great influence on the development of design thinking, which has gone on to influence and transform businesses and the way we experience our daily lives. Ethnographic research has proven invaluable to improve and innovate systems in many industries such as finance and healthcare. Human factors and ergonomics inform how we design products and our workplaces. As UX designers, we talk about a human centered approach that starts from a place of empathy. Taking a fresh look at counseling and art therapy, there is an opportunity for design thinking to come around and be applied in the therapeutic realm of mental health.

I first started thinking about design therapy as an alternative to art therapy differentiating on the fact that design is about solving problems. In Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, David Kelley writes that

“Design thinking relies on the natural — and coachable — human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.”

If we can teach a patient design principles and enable them not only to express themselves creatively but also to create something useful or helpful, they gain a sense of agency. We can empower the patient with new tools to see their problems from a different perspective. This may lead to emotional breakthroughs. Of course, these are preliminary thoughts and design therapy would not be appropriate for extreme traumatic cases. However, we are scratching the surface of design and mental health.

There is this idea of sense-making that has recently captivated me. Our five senses allow us to experience the world and make meaning; it is what makes us human. One aspect of sense-making is the haptic: of or relating to the sense of touch. Haptic design apples tactile sensation and control to product interaction. In Designing Design, Kenya Hara challenges us to reconsider how design engages the world. In speaking of haptic design Hara quotes physicist Hermann Ludwig Helmholtz(1821‐1894) who said, “Everything is an event on the skin.” Hara describes how we imagine our world, that

“A huge amount of information is transferred to the brain through the sensory organs, yet our interpretations of the world are not based on new information alone, but on the collation of new information with copious memory. Our sensory perceptions are incessantly fusing together in the brain, amalgamating and interrelating.”

We are a society that has dulled our senses. As much as we obsess about ourselves, our lifestyle and our image, we run on coffee and little sleep. We lament that we are terrible at taking care of ourselves compared to previous generations, as many continue working 60+ hours a week. Esther Sternberg speaks of redesigning our hospitals to be healing spaces, and argues for the power of place to affect our health and well-being. We have the tools available to improve the quality of our mental lives. How will we use them?

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This will be a space where I will continue to explore emotion and design thinking, and the possibilities of what it means for mental health — the beginning of an exciting path of inquiry into the healing potential of design therapy. Stay tuned as we pioneer new ground together.

Design Thinking in Soul Care was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design Thinking in Soul Care

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