Estefania Ciliotta - Portfolio - Addressing Climate Change's impact on Mental Health

Team members: Sara Carr–Health Sciences; Michael Arnold Mages and Miso Kim–Design; and Susan Mello–Communication Studies.

Research | In Progress

Picture by Michael A. Mages

Introduction

How might design research support other fields in looking for ways to address difficult problems? What role might design play in research? Particularly, how might design help understand and address issues related to anxiety and
mental health?

Design has the potential to enhance research projects from different domains by incorporating innovative approaches through the design process. Iteration, prototyping, and testing are just some parts of the design process that can boost research practices. Particularly in researching sensitive matters like mental health and anxiety, design incorporates a human-centered approach so that the research becomes more conscious about the participants of the study. In this sense, design also introduces new ways for eliciting conversations about delicate matters, for example by incorporating evocative objects and designed artifacts that allow insights to emerge. Finally, design supports research methodologies and practices to be able to quickly adapt to changing situations and embrace uncertainty that may emerge in the context of the research.

This group encompassed a collaborative team composed of researchers from different domains: design, communications, and health sciences.

Background & Research Questions

Presently, there is a growing need to understand and halt the negative effects of climate change in the environment. However, less has been done to understand the impact of climate change on mental health. The Climate Change and Health Research Project aimed to understand attitudes in young adults (18-24) regarding climate change and how it affects physical or mental health and health behaviors. This project started with the hypothesis that environmental problems and the current climate change situation may be experienced emotionally by young adults, affecting beliefs, attitudes, values related to resilience, agency, hope, despair, nihilism, anxiety, and stress, affecting in turn health behaviors.
Some of the questions this research group hoped to
address were:

- In what ways attitudes towards climate change may influence other health behaviors?
- Do these behaviors/attitudes change depending on socioeconomic status?
- How might design help other health sciences uncover these beliefs and attitudes from young adults?
- How might design help youth face climate challenges? How might design develop tools to serve as coping mechanisms?

Implications of Design in
Collaborative Research

1. Design for conversations and shared action within the research

I argue that design plays a significant role in supporting research for complex issues. Design acts as a bridge that can enhance conversations among diverse individuals. Design for conversations is a way in which people can share understanding and action to achieve common goals (Dubberly and Pangaro 2015). In designing for conversations, designers pay attention to the research team’s needs. As a team, people have different views and perspectives, and designers can act as facilitators, helping bring to light desires and points of view, making them visible for promoting a shared understanding. During this project, for example, the use of white-boards, post-its, and co-creative activities was very useful for visualizing everyone’s perspectives and facilitating the discussion. This, in my view, is one of the richest moments in design as a collaborative field. Not only does design support other fields to embrace innovative approaches, but also, design learns from more structured fields and the way they do research. The richness comes therefore, in the blending of these perspectives and traditions through conversations, combining expertise and allowing new forms of research techniques to emerge. For example, experience design brings a new approach to facing research problems by being solution agnostic, providing openness to merge traditional research processes with the design process.

Additionally, design helps imagine different scenarios and futures for the problem that is being studied. These scenarios may be seen sometimes by traditional fields as too imaginative, or even impossible. In these conversations between a very imaginative future versus a conservative one, design helps arrive at a middle point, thus, building common ground and shared points of view among researchers. This in turn, provides a more cohesive
research approach.

2. Design promotes sensitivity through a human-centered approach

I believe design helps embrace sensitivity to issues like mental health (anxiety, stress, despair) when using a human-centered approach to develop a better understanding of the potential needs and problems that may emerge in the context of a research intervention.

In ideating about the best ways in which we might be able to foster a comfortable and safe discussion among young adults, we focused on understanding how this particular audience may feel and think, in order to design mechanisms that may be more suiting for them when it comes to talking about deep thoughts, feelings, and attitudes towards climate change and health. Discussions with team members and brief iterations of potential prompts and questions led us to think about designing co-creation workshops as a research method. Later, the literature review confirmed that the design of co-creation workshops is a useful approach for eliciting conversations around climate and health. In this case, designing a workshop experience to talk about mental health issues was taken very seriously so that every stage and prompt that was designed was carefully considered to not affect participants. Moreover, we discussed that a way in which difficult conversations like this one could be addressed, was through evocative objects (Turkle 2007). I had prior research experience designing workshops incorporating the use of evocative objects and designing for conversations to address cross-cultural issues, embracing diversity with successful outcomes. Therefore, I argued that the use of facilitative designed objects may be a great approach for designing for conversations to develop a broad and contextual understanding of youth viewpoints related to climate.

Design research method:
Co- creation workshops

I wanted to help the research team design an innovative and comfortable way of exploring this complex issue: the effects of climate change in mental health. I wanted to help participants discuss and talk about mental health issues freely and in a safe environment.

During the planning sessions, I helped the team develop an understanding of the importance of having a set of goals for the workshop experience:

- To be a surfacing activity aimed to generate more research questions for the survey.The survey is another research method that we plan to use after the workshop to gather more insights.
- To think about the objects we can design to facilitate future conversations about climate and health.
- To uncover the kind of language this target group uses to talk about climate change issues and feelings.
- To learn and develop a mental/theoretical framework in order to design a tool that may work as a coping mechanism.

With the goals and issue in mind, and the target audience as the center of our research, we wanted to start the workshop with a more playful and active stage. This stage involved a fun activity as an icebreaker to ask participants to physically locate themselves within a set of prompts related to attitudes and beliefs about climate change.

Additionally, I guided the team to develop a set of prompts and questions framed under focused conversation techniques (Stanfield and Senge 1997). These techniques helped design a set of guiding questions taking into consideration the anxiety that may emerge when discussing delicate issues. The focused conversation method suggests starting from a more general and objective conversation to more deep and reflective ones.

Moving into the more reflective stages, we incorporated the design of the evocative objects to enhance the conversation in a safer manner. In this particular project, design helped ideate about the materials that may be more suitable for eliciting conversations about climate change and health. We chose stones as a natural element and decided to laser print them with symbols that relate to climate change and related issues. We brainstormed about the symbols and their associations: natural environment, climate/weather, emotions, health, and lifestyle, for example: cars, fire, sun, waves, trees, animals, plastic bottles, bike, footprint, temperature, mountains, among others.

This point elicits how design helps pay attention to the smallest details like the type of materials and relationships between prompts, materials, and objectives of the study to make sure that the most important part is embracing a human-centered approach to respect and value participants’ well-being.

Prototype with empty PlayDoh containers

Prototype with Cork Knobs

3. Design supports prototyping and testing before the research takes place to reduce anxiety during the intervention

The next activity we designed for the workshop is the co-creative activity. Our objective with this activity was to facilitate and surface participants’ ability to draw connections between climate change, emotional responses, and outcomes. For example, we imagined a board with different words in some sort of surface. The words would be related to climate change, behavioral responses, attributions of responsibility, and coping mechanisms. The idea is to ask participants to wrap yarn around the words they connect with.

As I mentioned previously, design helps researchers pay attention to the materials used and how potential participants may interact with them. Therefore, the design of prototypes to be used in the research becomes a priority, especially when addressing delicate issues like anxiety. I ventured into designing potential prototypes for this activity. For one approach I used cork, for the other one, recycled plastic materials (Playdoh containers). Some learnings from these prototypes were:

Cork Doorknobs: This may work if we make the cork knobs bigger, and if we manage to either print the tag names on the outer layer of the cork, or if the tags are bigger and placed next to the cork knob (left or right), so it is not hidden when participants wrap the yarn.

Recycled Playdoh containers: I wanted to use recycled materials as they relate to climate change. I used plastic Playdoh containers. The color caps help to make the prototype more appealing. Additionally, having the words in the outer layer makes reading easier.

Once again, this point supports the idea that designing prototypes for each activity before the workshop experience is beneficial in order to discover potential flaws and errors that may provoke more stress, anxiety, and discomfort during the actual research intervention. In studying sensitive issues that may increase anxiety, design helps maintain the focus of the research while making sure that the intervention remains safe for participants.

4. Design supports research projects by designing artifacts that boost the intervention

Particularly in research projects related to anxiety and mental health issues, design can help develop artifacts to guide the research in a natural way. For example, for this workshop I designed the “Climate and Health Wheel” inspired by the “Wheel of Life”[1]. The goal of this artifact is to support participants to relate to a set of prompts associated to climate health and attitudes, grading themselves to the degree of which they feel they connect with the prompts. This artifact promotes gathering insights from participants in a less invasive and more personal way.
[1] https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_93.htm

5. Design supports embracing uncertainty and adapting to rapidly-changing situations that may impact the research

We were about to run the first workshop when the COVID-19 pandemic forced universities to work virtually. The implications for this research project didn’t allow for the possibility of having a face-to-face workshop experience. The research team, guided by the design researchers, rapidly brainstormed about potential alternatives and pathways for continuing with the project.Some ideas for future workshop scenarios imply designing an online workshop experience that incorporate the virtual exploration of the objects and discussion. Additionally, we are iterating some ideas to face the crisis and adapt our design research to the new scenario presented by COVID-19. For example:

- Run a preliminary survey to inform our online
workshop design.

- Use probes to gather insights about peoples’ feelings and reactions about current climate change improvement. Particularly, I see this idea as an opportunity to utilize this context and people’s availability to introduce Instagram challenges related to climate change. I have also seen stories, pictures, and posts of people sharing their happiness and contempt when seeing positive changes in the environment, for example, reduction of pollution.

- Conduct experimental participatory study, like design fiction that asks participants to image that the current stay-at-home scenario is actually due to future sea-level change or a pandemic released from melting icebergs, and participate in some activities with our provocations.

While our research team is still discussing these approaches, this showcases the key role design plays in research practices by supporting rapid adaptation to unplanned situations. More importantly, design helps keep the human-centered approach at the core when redesigning the research methodology that best suits participants and the goal of the study.

Prototype: "My Climate Health Wheel"

Research Redesign | COVID 19

Due to COVID 19, gathering students for a workshop was complicated. We decided to redesign the research by creating a creative toolkit which incorporates the same theoretical background and aims for similar engagement strategies as previously described.

Here are some images from some of the toolkit's activities:

Conclusions

This research project showcases how design plays a significant role in supporting collaborative research projects that aim to address complex and sensitive issues. Particularly, through this research I found that the design field becomes a fundamental player in facilitating collaboration among diverse researchers and blending traditional research practices with more innovative ones. Additionally, design incorporates parts of the design process to come up with new ways of addressing the objective of the research. Prototyping and choosing adequate materials to use during the research becomes key for supporting participants to engage with safe activities while gathering the insights researchers need. Moreover, design brings a human-centered approach which prioritizes participants well-being during the research. This is of greater importance when researching sensitive issues like mental health and other matters that may increase anxiety or discomfort. Finally, design helps researchers adapt to changes and unplanned situations that may emerge. Design helps to embrace uncertainty with a positive attitude and to rapidly change the designed research approach while maintaining the focus and goal of the research and adapting to the new context.