MIND: Service Design Centred around Mental and Physical Wellbeing

MIND is mental health charity. They take in people suffering from mental health conditions who have been through NHS but still suffer from these conditions and as such they provide them with support.

Typical sufferers range from psychosis, Korsakoff’s syndrome, depression, anxiety, carpal tunnel syndrome and among others. This brief, “Can you promote healthier or safer lifestyle?” was supplied by MIND Nottingham to Nottingham Trent University.

Using mainly a service design methodology along with person centred and inclusive design to tackle this brief.

Through many hours of brainstorming, the final conclusion we came was to run a workshops to evoke feelings associated with food whilst teaching participants about the benefits of such food. We felt certain foods will bring back such memories which will allow the participant to reminisce whilst creating a bond with the MIND staff whilst they learn to make simple and healthy food that are beneficial to themselves.

A service design methodology allows, us as designers to design for the front end of the design as well as the back end. Following conceptualisation, perquisite questions were designed for the participants so that MIND staff will have better understanding of what kind of help the participants may require, these included questions such as “how confident are you in your cooking skills?” and “how confident are you in using a knife”, where emoticons are used to answer the question (as they are simple and easy to understand).

The first part of the workshop begins with a sensory experience with traditional/disregarded herbs/food, where the participant will be asked to close their eyes and reveal what is associated with the smell and texture of the herb/fruit/vegetable.

Second part of the workshop involves a table full of variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs (research proves these food have many benefits) and they can create either a juice or salad with blender and food processor. Using only one fruit, one vegetable and one herb as described by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall provides the full flavour of each item. This will allow the participant to play with the food in engaging and fun manner and create something unique in which they have a bond with. The participant can then cut the food or blend the food to create a salad or a juice which they can then taste and again explain their sensory experience making it a memorable experience.

Finally we would create a game sheet, where they would be stickers of food with numbers where the participant can stick on their sheets to memorise what they created in workshop today (for example 1 juice = 2 carrot-men + 1 mango lady + 1 coriander lad). We are also setting out to create a body map of food, what we mean by this is for example, carrots are good for the eyes, in our body map the eyes are replaced by carrots to create an awareness for the participant.

The project undertook 4 preliminary workshop sessions to test the design before being handed to MIND Nottingham to be used with their participants.