Title: Compassion By Design
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Abstract: Why is there compassion deficit in the culture of care? How can creative design process generate sustainable empathy in care communities? The paradox of authority is that when used to implement instructions, it generates the coercive and institutionally compliant behaviour that is the antithesis of an activated and spontaneous compassionate responsibility towards others. Nursing staff are especially vulnerable to being made institutionally compliant and deferential. Nursing, as noted by Menzies-Lyth, is frequently categorized as among the least prestigious of the occupations in care institution. Uniforms, titles, work descriptions and conditions can emphasize the impersonal status of the care nurse in the residential care home. This may be further exacerbated by the nurses' own defences against the considerable anxieties that are activated when working with old people who suffer from degenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's Disease, and those who will never recover independence. The emotional resources needed for end of life care, like those of palliative care, are especially demanding. This research asks if emotional resources can be sustained through a more psychologically nuanced, dialogical process of co creation workshop process as an integral part of the workplace. Alternating mechaniset with opportunities for intervals of creative spontaneity, working collaboratively with families and friends of residents as well as with residents themselves, will provide a means for assessing the beneficial effects of collaborative, co-creation design practice on the care home institution. Obtaining qualitative, rather than metric, data about the relational quality of cultural experience is crucial. The psychological (Baron Cohen:2012) and psychoanalytical (Bollas:1989, Menzies-Lyth:1960) offer a complex, post-positivist social science. Psychodynamic processes can enable researchers to use their own subjectivity as a legitimate medium for knowledge and judgment of research into emotional experience of art and design research. As a post-modern autoethnographic method, the conscious use of the researchers' subjectivity opens new and innovative ways for approaching creative art and design practices as research processes. This research project applies the concept of integrative co-operation as the basis of creative culture in order to suggest that there may be a way that design can provide an effective means of implementing (some of) the proposals of the Francis Report (2013) into the 'compassion deficit' in cultures of care. Implementing changes in the training of nursing care staff, may best be supported with research data showing that art and design creative processes can provide a means of developing a more sustainable culture of compassion. The way that cooperation acts as an intra-psychic process of integration, of fragmented parts of the self, is understood as the basis for the way that culture is experienced as emotionally meaningful and as socially integrative. Emotional reciprocity actuated through creativity is offered as data.This project aims to gather, test and evaluate the emotional quality of researchers' subjective responses as legitimate and significant research data. How is the creative process a medium for the transmission of emotional experience from one subject to another? What are the ways that this transmission can be best understood as data for use in theorising creative art and design research? How is the subject held, in integrity and solitude, by the 'spirit of the object' (Bollas)? This research project aims to establish analogies between the processes of creativity and of care. It does this by tracing the empathy through which a utilitarian design task is successfully completed in the Alexandra Care Home in Harlow Essex. The case study is then offered for critical discussion with colleagues in a range of allied fields. Is it possible to create Compassion By Design?


Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE