About Me
I love to drink tea, read books, listen to music, and journal. To date, I have seven tea sets (teapots & cups) and two standalone cast iron teapots that I enjoy brewing all kinds of tea in. I enjoy writing with fountain pens (yes they still exist) and journaling about my day, the anime I recently watched, or simply writing to-do lists. My oldest hobby however is reading. I've been reading since for as long as I can remember and it's an activity that I treasure. My favorite book of all time is Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
The Innovate Experience
The Project: Hearts Together
Our team focused on mental health. The goal was to innovate and advertise mental health resources that could be found on campus. We called this program Hearts Together. It is the hope of our team that this campaign will be able to efficiently utilize resources that we have on campus that tackle mental health while also helping students feel comfortable speaking about their mental health issues. We went through about three to four rounds of empathy, where we talked to key stakeholder, and several iterations of our prototype before we fixated on this idea.
The Hearts Together campaign has two focuses: advertising ODU's myriad of mental health resources and providing hands-on training and forums that allow faculty, staff, and students to identify when fellow Monarchs are in need.
The program was split into two parts: Stronger Together and See Something Say Something.
Stronger Together focused on getting students hands on help by matching them with other students in focus groups which are facilitated by trained mental health professionals. Stronger Together specifically targets students who are suffering with depression, eating disorders, and interpersonal relationships.
See Something Say Something focuses on breaking the stigma that African American and Latinx students face when trying to communicate with others about their mental health struggles.
A challenge that this campaign faces is proper advertising as services that offer mental health resources are always up against things like societal stigma and the topic of mental health itself is rather delicate.
Mindsets of a human-centered Designer
I practiced the Innovation is for Everyone mindset when I had to listen to ideas that deviated from my own during our process. This taught me that all ideas are equal even if they differ from mine.
I practiced the Know Your Why mindset during our process by tapping into my own experiences as someone who struggles with mental health issues. This allowed me to be more open and passionate about our process.
I practiced the Show & Tell mindset when I had to advertise our prototype to others during our empathy rounds. By advertising our program, I was able to practice public speaking and our pitch.
I practiced the Radical Collaboration mindset when I had to speak with faculty about their experiences when it came to teaching students who have dealt with/deal with mental health issues during our process. Practicing this mindset allowed me to understand a different perspective of our problem.
I practiced the Empathetic & Human-Centered mindset when I had to speak to several different groups of people to gain data to narrow down our initial problem during our process. This taught me that while people may agree on the big picture, they rarely agree on the small details. Furthermore, the small details are what matters to most people.
I practiced the Embrace Ambiguity mindset when I had to realize that there wasn't going to be an immediate fix or instant gratification from completing this process. This taught me how to be patient and open to change.
I practiced the Iterate, Iterate, Iterate mindset when I had to continuously do rounds of empathy and prototyping with my team during our process. This taught me that the work is never finished and that a project is never perfect and the product can always be tweaked.
Applying Innovate Experiences in the future
Now that the project is over, I really only have one word to describe the entire experience: intense. I suppose one can add draining to that list as well. I feel like I have worked hard to take this program from idea to pitch and it there was a lot of ups and downs. At first, I wasn't too enthusiastic about the topic, mental health. After all, as someone who deals with mental health issues, I know first hand that it's not a topic for the faint of heart and it can be very daunting when trying to come up with solutions. But overall, I think that my team did as good a job as we could with the resources available to us. I think that our program, Hearts Together, is simple yet effective. It is not a complete solution to the challenge of tackling mental health, but it is a start and can be used as a blueprint for further innovation in the realm of mental health for ODU going forward. Our idea focuses on making sure students are heard, know about campus resources, and are aware that they have someone in their corner whenever they are struggling. When one is struggling with mental health issues, they can feel isolated; Hearts Together hopes that the student body can be just that: a group of hearts-people-together.
Credits:
Created with images by namoliang - "teapot tea cup tea" • truthseeker08 - "hands team united" • Pexels - "hands heart red paint"