Concept Presentation

We have just completed our concept generation presentation which signals the end of Semester 1! It was hard to put a semester's worth of research into 10 minutes but I think I managed to succeed. 

Script

Opening slide 

This is my project DOJO it is focused around social anxiety

People who suffer from anxiety live with anger and fear, feelings that can control their lives.  These feelings continue, building up inside the sufferer’s head. This build up leads to autonomic responses, shortness of breath, being paralysed or frozen – a panic attack. Finding out how people not only react to their anxiety but how people get over it has been key to my project. When people know they need help they go to counselling, but panic can strike at any moment. I believe there is a space to build something that can aid counselling, breaking the dependencies people may have towards their counsellors and letting them get on with their lives.

Research  

So my research began with me carrying out lots of desk research. I wanted to understand what social anxiety is, how it affects people and what it makes them think.  So just to get a general concept I looked at the information the NHS and National Institute of Mental health give. This was mostly just giving an outline of the condition as a whole, symptoms, causes and outline of help offered.  I did this with a couple of other medical sites and charities, such as SA Scotland and MIND, which showed me where people might look for help.

I started look at the ways people can overcome their anxiety. A lot where vague, suggesting to see a GP and medication but the one that kept recurring is CBT. CBT seems to be the big one when it comes to treating anxiety, NHS suggest it as the non-medicated way to overcome anxiety. It’s all about turning your negative thinking into rational, positive thinking, in turn trying to change their behaviour and learning how to control anxious emotions when it strikes up.

I dived into type of therapy, looking into how it works and is carried out with counsellors and specialists.  This morphed into looking at self-help, as I began seeing how people might do this themselves. I began looking at how CBT can be executed through self-help, reading books, (visual CBT), following exercises on line and looking at apps that use CBT to change your thinking. I was over whelmed by the amount of self-help stuff there is out there.

So after looking at all this self help material I was curious to see if it actually helped. So I needed to speak to people who have carried it out, and from doing this research before I had found a forums where people had been talking about their anxiety.  Reddit was very popular, and after going though the Social Anxiety sub reddit I could see there is a bit of a community here. People were asking questions and people who related or have done it before were answering and giving advice and reassurance.

This is what led me into my user research. With a basic understanding of what this condition was, I needed to grasp what a person who suffers from social anxiety thinks and gain insights.  Being a sensitive user group I looked back on research I’d done before and used reddit as a way to speak. 

I first posted on the Social Anxiety sub reddit asking if people wanted to answer some questions about anxiety, asking how it impacts their lives and how they help themselves try over come it. I only got two responses, but the answers were very rich and made it easy to see that everyone is different when it comes to Social Anxiety. I explored reddit more, looking at different feeds with similar audiences, such as the anxiety sub reddit, and social skills sub reddit. I posted a couple of questions to different feeds to get different insights. One question that gave me a lot was one I posted on Explain to me like I’m 5, “People with social anxiety. What thoughts run through your head when your anxiety kicks in?”  People talked to each other about what they each experience and what they do that calms them down and takes them away.

Throughout these posts there was a common trend of relaxation, people seemed to use it a lot to calm down their anxiety or before they went into a situation that would make them anxious. So my main insights from reddit were exposure, know when you are anxious & relaxation, do something about it.

Whilst doing this I was speaking to professionals in this field to find out how they treat anxiety and the difficulties they counter.

I spoke to Eilidh, who is president of University of Dundee Mental Health Society and Mike Ramsay a mental health nurse in Dundee.

Eilidh and mike both spoke about the problem that people need to learn when to recognise when they have a problem and do something about it. There is a movement from natural body response of fear to something more clinical.

Mike was talking about how he dealt with anxiety as a nurse, calming people down in hospitals, discussion and simple relaxation methods occurred again.

Because speaking and being open had been such a theme in my research as a healthy coping mechanism I observed in a group session run by the University called Living Life to The Full. I found that it was very relaxed environment, what you would expect at a group session, but people were willing to let loose and talk about their thoughts and feelings. I think that knowing you are not alone and people feel the same as you help, and this was highlighted in this observation.

So I wanted to get out of Uni services and see counsellors in the real world per say. I spoke to Tim Allen, a counsellor at Momentum in centre of Dundee. Time spoke about how he deals with his patients who suffer with anxiety. Because everyone is different this is something that needs to be tailored, highlighted the fact for me, if you need help counselling is useful.

He spoke about dealing with the core of the problem, but people need to build up their responses to impulses their bodies give them when they are anxious.

So I gathered all this information and I saw two gaps, one being a space to encourage people to seek help, helping them figure out when they need to seek help and ridding the stigma of mental health. The other was an aid to counseling, trying to replicate what people are learning in counseling and breaking the dependency people have with counselors.

My final interview was with Caroline Adamson, head counselor at University counseling services. I went in speaking to Caroline having the idea in my head of focusing on relaxation and how it can be used to stop panic attacks. Her method of treating patients with anxiety is normalizing the responses to anxiety and changing the way people think. She also said about how people need to learn how to deal with their physical symptoms, and relaxation techniques were something that helped a lot of people.

Scenario

This is someone who has anxious thought, walking down the street on a normal day. These thoughts start to snowball, getting worse and worse, and it is not having the ability to think rationally, that cause someone to start to go into a state of panic.  My research showed me to control anxiety you need to be able to control your thoughts and the physical symptoms. I want to create something that stops it here (points mouth) and ensures the user can continue on with their day.

Design

This leads me onto design. Thinking about the idea of relaxation, the senses are obviously a big topic when it comes to self-soothing and I think the idea of touch is a very rich area. For example when you hit your arm you rub it, this is a self soothing mechanism, the rub isn’t going to help the bruise, its just going to make you feel better and I think this logic can be applied when creating something to calm panic before it takes over.

Touch can be embedded to help people breath, which is a major factor when calming panic.

I have seen many examples of breathing to visulisation, it gives structure and a regular beat to breathe too. I think all three of these aspects are connect and key when thinking about the design language of this project.

Technology

As I do not have a solid concept on what I am going to create next semester it is hard to preempt the technology I may use. Like I said before this could be a very rich screen based experience. This would be through creating an application, maybe creating visualizations though after effects or processing and embedding these in a prototype application like Proto. I am also open to exploring linking this to a physical object, again focusing on the autonomic responses to anxiety and how something physical can calm this.

Weightings and where to next? 

People

People is the highest, because this is for people with anxiety, there needs to be a clear under standing of emotions and feelings and if these are not considered it wont work for them.

Design

So design is second as, backing up what I said in my design slides, my focus is to create something that is effective and also beautiful, yet not extremely apparent that is linked to anxiety.