Collaborative design of health educational materials on anxiety to increase mental health literacy

Abstract

Conceptualising mental health literacy as a wicked problem, the project uses visual and interaction design principles and evidence based mental health information to develop a health communication resource on anxiety for multiple stakeholders (young people, their loved ones and mental health professionals). This project is a design response to the challenges of providing visual and interactive representations of anxiety and its invisible and abstract processes, aiming to provide novel ways of engaging with information by designing a new visual language with a shared frame of reference for education and empathy building. To aid the relevance, acceptability and feasibility of resources, the project focuses on using holistic approaches through synthetising and testing a novel, unifying design framework and using collaborative design elements with multiple target audiences. The design outcome will be evaluated from both a design and health perspective.