11.P. Skills building seminar: Co-design workshop on reducing institutionalisation in mental health facilities by everyday objects
Authors:   Organised by: University College London (UK), Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (Germany),   Chair persons: Evangelia Chrysikou (EUPHA-URB)
Published: October 2021

Psychiatric facilities tend to resemble highly institutional settings in which patients experience a severe loss of control in impersonal and sterile built environments. Design features such as everyday objects offer the potential to be psychosocially beneficial by strengthening patients' internal locus of control and increasing their well-being. Building on material priming and consumer psychology research, this workshop aims at ideating concepts to increase domesticity in psychiatric wards and allow higher levels of control and individualisation in patients. Using co-creation methods, participants will transfer concepts from non-clinical settings to the complex and challenging context of mental health. Three seven-minutes-presentations introduce the topic in a transdisciplinary manner - medical architecture, environmental psychology and design research.

Then, during a subsequent role playing co-creation workshop, participants will take either the role of a patient or a member of the hospital management. “Patients” will be asked to leave for a couple of minutes to explore their surroundings and return, bringing with them and presenting to the rest of the participants an object from their domestic surroundings that they find valuable to equip a psychiatric patient room. During their absence, “Members of hospital management” will assume more detailed roles (for example somebody might wish to be the infection control person, some other the clinical director etc) and then through a role playing process, they will be asked to evaluate these objects in terms of safety, therapeutic risks and other aspects that they consider important. Eventually, both parties –the “patients” and the “representatives of the institutions” aim at finding consent on overall criteria and examples for everyday objects that represent valorisation and domesticity and at the same time are appropriate to use in psychiatric facilities. By setting up a list of criteria and ideating useful object categories, we aim at identifying potentials and risks concerning perceptions and connotations of certain objects in relation to mental disorders.

The workshop will be a highly interactive session to elaborate the topic of stigma and objects in mental health. Participants will gain knowledge on the state of the art and insights to set up similar co-design consultations in their trusts or - if they are designers - to use the structure for their client consultations. Focussing on co-creation, participants will benefit from both interacting with the researchers and other attendees. This exercise will be highly valuable for the participants to acquire soft skills in participatory design easily applicable in facilities and estates as well as capital projects in mental healthcare providers. Learnings and variations of this exercise could be also applicable in settings of long term care such as care homes, facilities for autisms and even coercive environments.

Key messages

This workshop aims at understanding how the built environment and daily objects communicate valorisation vs. institutionalisation in psychiatric wards. By taking the role of patients or hospital managers, participants are encouraged to train empathy and experience co-creational elements to foster innovation and need-oriented design concepts.