Social Links (Asynchronous Session)
Campfires, Totems, and Battle Flags: Design as Catalyst for Building Social Capital View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Douglas May
By returning to basic principles this research identifies three items as contextual analogies for the purpose of generating a study about imagination, social systems, and graphic symbols. Consider the concept of campfires as a scenario for generating both visual and spoken language. The fire itself does not contain a specific message but enables our vision and subsequently the subconscious imagination that fuels creativity. Such wonderment can be a catalyst for greater social understanding by generating novel ideas, but also through the community connectedness that contributes to social capital development. Totems are visual systems symbolizing a society’s unwritten order with overall responsibility to the clan. Totem cultures have appeared independently of each other throughout the globe with their presence signaling an intrinsic human need for order, respect, and connectedness to the world around them. Battle flags are symbols that lead the charge and foster our allegiance. They provide visual direction during times of chaos and uncertainty – and if lost, they can signal defeat. Visual branding is an equivalent of the battle flag in that employees and customers alike seek out confidence and trust through their visual presence and experiences around them. By examining these three fundamental subjects analogically, the author discusses conceptual possibilities for combining creativity, community, and symbology for designing events as the catalyst for building social capital in communities.
Implementing Service Design Methods Towards Successful Journeys in University Student Mental Health View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maya Jenkins
While mental health resources and treatment for college students are at their most plentiful, barriers persist that create inaccessibility, including long wait times for treatment, impressions of uncaring staff and institution, being directed to inappropriate resources, and a long standing social stigma against mental health challenges. While treatment has proven to be very effective, a vast majority of students with a mental illness do not seek help and there is little to no data about the experience towards the appropriate treatment. Moreover, there is little input from people who are routinely placed in the position of a patient rather than as experts of their experiences. Inquiry in these experiences seek to address the gap between the services formed by facilitators of student mental healthcare and the realities of the experiences of the students in any relation to said services. The research intent was to enact a service design methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of the current student experience in seeking help for mental health challenges and inform how design for services can improve and further facilitate these experiences. This methodology aimed to employ the ideas of Ohio State college students between the ages of 18 and 29 who have experience interacting with mental health services and resources to inform the development and design of a more ideal help-seeking experience. The resulting artifacts illustrate better facilitation of student help-seeking, assurance of a more successful journey towards accessing, and receiving the appropriate resources and treatment.
Urban Farming in the Time of Climate Change: A Study Abroad Methodology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Camilo Cerro
Creating an interdependent narrative for a study abroad program has the potential to unify an academic experience under a common language. For eleven students, this was the case on the Fall of 2019, when they signed up to participate in our semester abroad program in Barcelona, Spain. The studio program (ARC401/501) was structured to look at an urban community as we engaged in an experiment on social design aimed at proposing ideas to help them adapt to the challenges presented by the climate crisis in the next decade. The students were given a program divided into two aspects: A macro aspect of the program, composed of a large-scale urban farm which was fixed; and a micro series of satellite programs to be proposed by the students. These were to be related to their understanding of the relationship between the macro program and the needs of the community around our site. The outcomes of the semester abroad program where a series of well-developed projects covering interesting programmatic solutions that incorporated advanced social tools for the development of community-oriented responses to present and future problems. But the more important results are seen in how a series of students manifested agency on the future of their planet. The paper expands on these themes and on how a methodology was established to allow for a common interdependent narrative between courses and activities to develop agency through experiential learning.
