REFLECTION 3: Peer Review 2

Since the last crit, I have continued to explore the links between anxiety or depression and creativity. For the practical, after finding a common interest in helping young men suffering from anxiety and depression to speak up, me and a marketing student at Leeds Beckett (who sits within the demographic) have decided to launch a t-shirt brand. Lots of our friends are very interested in fashion and wearing the right thing but mental health is a taboo. Our aim is to bring mental health into men’s fashion as a way of bringing the conversation to them. The brand will also give its profits to mind, further supporting our mission.

In the crit I got some feedback saying that men won’t want to wear their mental health on their backs. Putting my designs on t-shirts is the wrong context and they are better suited to editorial. The fact that not everyone wants a t-shirt that portrays symptoms of anxiety and depression is a definite point for consideration. Since the crit, I have asked around and had a variety of responses so I am going to vary the t-shirts from more subtle to more obvious. On the subtler t-shirts the concept will be made clear in an animated version on the website. We would also like to have something that you scan on the tshirt that plays the animated version on your phone, maybe a bar-code? But we are yet to find an app. This would work well as a light access point to starting a conversation about anxiety or depression. By showing friends their animated t-shirt, young men would do it almost without intending to. However, in terms of it being the wrong context, I personally believe that it is the right context if we want to reach our audience.

Trying to create designs that are wearable and attractive but that also communicate the concept has proved a challenge. This is because I have had to find a sort of a balance between not making light of a dark issue but also not creating something so dark that young men won’t want to wear it on a t-shirt. This is the first time I have had to balance two such different contexts. However, I have found working with someone within the targeted demographic to be very useful because I can get constant feedback from my audience. I have also found that having put so much time into the crafting each designs so that they balance the context, they have become quite separate both in subject and style. This works well to attract a wider audience, but I am worried that they won’t sit together well as a collection. However, I am hoping that I can unite them with a limited color scheme and by using a clean graphic style.

I have also recently conducted the same interviews with two sufferers and a therapist and their responses have really helped me to define anxiety in my essay as well as making me feel more secure in the direction I have taken my practical work. All of them said that the Mind definition of anxiety was accurate, but too generalized. All the symptoms were listed but most sufferers only experience a couple, making each experience of anxiety different. This supports my earlier decision to focus on specific symptoms rather than the disease as a whole, as people will hopefully find specific t-shirts more relatable.

Northern Healthcare Conference

Reflection: Generally, the conference was fairly interesting and I took a few things from it but it wasn’t exactly what I thought I had signed up to. Online all it said was ‘there will be talks from various healthcare professionals sharing their insights and ideas into how we can progress the mental health sector’ then when I got there the theme was ‘the economic benefits of assisted living’ and most of the people there were commissioners. I wanted to interview some people but none of their lines of work were very related to the questions I wanted to ask. I think I’m better off interviewing sufferers, artists and possibly someone in the field of art therapy?

Creativity, Mental Health Triangulation Notes

REFLECTION 2: Peer review 1

Since my SOI I have changed my focus to exploring the links between creativity and mental health. It is something I keep stumbling across, a big debate on the Eye on Design website. It is also something I as a creative would love to solve and a more narrowed approach to exploring anxiety and depression. Initially, I thought about doing some editorials, which describe some of these links. However, I found this to be too limiting. To represent creativity, I found myself using obvious symbols like pencils and paint. This is something I would like to avoid. It also wasn't doing anything to help sufferers of anxiety and depression and this is something I aim to do.

In terms of primary research, I want to do a questionnaire to find out how creativity and mental health come together in my peer’s lives but I am struggling to know which questions I can and can’t ask. This is something I need to be very sensitive toward, so I am going to get it checked by multiple tutors before I use anything. I also managed to get the contact of the curator of the Bethelm Mental Hospital gallery, who I emailed last week. He hasn't replied yet but fingers crossed!! I definitely need some more personal insights.

Generally, I am finding looking at anxiety and depression and trying to visually describe them a struggle. The aim of my work is to use my knowledge to describe them enough to start a conversation and explain them to non-sufferers. I know that as a non-sufferer I can never fully understand them myself and I am not trying to. With the knowledge that I don’t have anxiety or depression I’m finding that people have a very negative opinion on my work from the outset and I have had this voiced a lot. I am finding this difficult and I am unsure how sensitive to be. I have been using visual metaphor to clearly describe different feelings (inner conflict, struggle, tension). However, I am worried I am in danger of making light of a dark issue. Perhaps a more abstract approach would be better. It was suggested that I could use movement and sound to contort a brain on after effects and create an immersive experience. This could work well. In order to tackle this I am going to keep showing my work to friends who suffer from anxiety or depression, to discover which works best.

People also keep suggesting that my images would work well as editorials. However, I don’t want to go in this direction. I want to make the designs more accessible to sufferers (my target audience is still men age 21-25). I am interested in maybe starting a campaign or bringing the designs into a context that they are interested in like fashion. I need to start interviewing some of my male friends to see if they have any insights on how to do this. I thought that the ‘Time to Change’ beer mat campaign was interesting because it bought the conversation to them. Maybe I could do a subtler version of this?