Mapping and Diagramming
To Our Health is a project that was designed over the course of the Design in Visual Communication Honours Degree at the University of Technology Sydney. A huge part of my process involved mapping and diagramming on Miro as a way of collating and arranging my thoughts across the many systems and aspects of the game.
About mid-way through the project image of the map
In beginning the design process, due to all the ideas and aspects of what I was about to undertake, I took time to map out and compartmentalise all the research I had done in the first half of the course in order to set myself up better for the project.
Here, I also started to detail things like intentions, objectives for design outcome vs players, emotional journey, the scope, audience, tone and feel of the game I was after.
Originally, I had no clear idea of what type of game I wanted to create, other than a few specific types that I had experience with. As such I analysed each for their potential in relation to my intentions, aims and audience.
In beginning actually designing the game after deciding upon a pen and paper, card game hybrid, I set out planning and mapping the logistics of the game, the required pieces, assets, each of the individual prompts. Using an application like Miro allowed me to easily see how each aspect sit within the larger picture of the project itself.
Additionally, this project involved extensive research that underpins the outcome itself. Throughout the course, I took a research through design approach - that is, research through making as well as conventional reading. However, it can summarised into three areas:
1. Health and Wellbeing,
2. Assemblages and Complexity, and
3. Speculative Design, Critical Design and Design Fiction.
1. Health and Wellbeing
The majority of my research into this topic was attempting to grasp the complexity of the discourse around the definitions and understandings of the topic itself, as well as criticism on existing systems, practices and understandings of health.
In doing so, I discovered how there are no universal definitions of the terms 'health' and 'wellbeing' which are still highly debated. As such, for my research I had to create my own definitions which would set the parameters for how I was approaching this concept.
'Wellbeing is the culmination of the measure of a person's observable context (economic, social, cultural, physical health), and a person's subjective evaluation (physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, socially) of their lives, and relationship to their context. Health is a state of overall wellbeing'
In this way, I have framed health as a snapshot of wellbeing, whilst attempting to capture the complexity of both objective and subjective wellbeing that is present based on context to a person's life.
This framing allowed me to align my own personal experiences and understandings with discourse around 'Integrative Health', which even though also has its many strands and understandings, captures the notion of health and wellbeing being more than a cause and effect paradigm, but something far more complex. This led me to questions such as 'How might we complexify understandings of health and wellbeing?', 'What myths underpin existing paradigms of health and wellbeing?', 'How might we increase health literacy?' and 'How might we explore health and wellbeing in an integrated way?'
2. Assemblages and Complexity
A large part of my reading was into concepts surrounding complexity. This was particularly fascinating as I read into frameworks such as complex adaptive systems, systems thinking, transition design, and in particular, entanglement and assemblages.
The idea of entanglement, which anthropologist Anna Tsing et al. refers to in the book 'Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene' (2018) uses to embody the natural and artificial complexity present in our world. Through the series of essays, they highlight the inseparable entanglement of organisms to other organisms, animals to climate and in particular, humans to non human bacteria. It presents a lens that stresses the relationships and interactions between humans, animals, environment and phenomena that all weave together and intersect in entanglement.
Assemblages, a term I was introduced to through the political theorist Jane Bennett (2005), are systems, networks and groupings of human and non human 'agents' whose relationships affect and influence each other. In other words, it frames the world a series of things like humans, electricity, culture, heat, animals, nature, weather, water, insects, etc. as 'agents' parts of various systems that have many relationships that have the capacity to affect and influence each other.
In particular, Bennett highlights how assemblages de-centre the human, opening up opportunities to open examine all agents within a system for potential root sources and consequences. It was this notion coupled with entanglement that drew me to assemblages as a means of opening up discussion and observation about the role of all aspects within our lives as a means of influencing health and wellbeing.
3. Speculative, Critical Design and Design Fiction
As a design research project, research was done in other areas, approaches and methodologies of design for potential ways I may approach the design of the outcome.
For this, I focused on three aspect of design, Speculative, Critical and Design Fiction. Speculative and Critical Design go hand in hand, and is valuable particularly because of its capacity to critique and challenge paradigms, norms and patterns of behaviour, provoking thought and discussion on topics.
An excellent example I looked into is 'Open Surgery' by Frank Kolkman (2015) that challenges intellectual property laws, trends in medical equipment innovation and the role of the 3D printing with a DIY robot that could plausibly perform keyhole surgery. This spoke directly to my research overall in health and wellbeing as a means of suggesting alternatives and critiquing existing systems of health.
Design Fiction, on the other hand, spoke to the role of storytelling as a means of eliciting rich discussions and feedback around potential design objects. The paper 'Co-creating and Assessing Future Wellbeing Technology Using Design Fiction' by Ahmadpour et al. (2019) details the outcomes from applying design fiction for speculative wellbeing technologies, that resulted in deeper and richer discussion about these speculative technologies more relevant people's daily lives rather than in during certain instances. For the purposes of my research, the storytelling, and more specifically, the worldbuilding around health and wellbeing was what stood out to me as a powerful method to apply in my design outcome.