POST 7: Issue mapping

by Jansie Vo

The collaborative workshop is a series of mapping exercises in class considering in the relationship of team composition, effective communication, distribution, and co-ordination in order to help build deeper understanding into the issue, allows each member has an opportunity to speak and share understanding by brainstorming to toward insightful outcomes. My group members had different approach in mental health placing the issue in different angles that helped me to uncover the best information and the learning goes much deeper. In terms of collaborative group, we found that a powerful approach to understanding the stakeholders that were identified in relationships with the key words related to mental health, who/which influencers who/which to develop appropriate messages to connect with them. From this brainstorming, the most voted words were related to negative emotion and behavior ‘invisible’, ‘exhausted’, ’victim’, ‘judgement’, ‘stress’, majority affects the individuals through social media.

It was interesting in controversy mapping involves the conflict between economic benefit and humanities progress in mental health. From the feedback from our tutor, I keep working on the actor mapping, and focus on specific area of my depression issue. I chose to analyse the international student as an actor of Mental Health cause Australia is host to many thousands of international students of an age when mental illnesses are most likely to surface, has influence much in emotional and physical well-being.

During group process, we together pointed out and clarified a variety of paticipants such as medicare, policies, and social media, education, school, family and individuals that look beyond helping me with a problem, emphasize action and influence as well as reaction and adaption on mental illness.

What I learned from the collaborative workshop is a number of learning roles and ability to establish the relationship to the other team members and negotiale in group discussion. I feel these exercises especially actor mapping are very helpful to understand the issue not only one side but see the issue in many different angles in the relationship of stakeholders and the importance of actor on mental health fiels to get correct answer involving to mental illness. I further gained more comprehensive deep knowledge of the mental health issue and identify what I missed within secondary research. This will help me to identify the problem I want to target for engagement. Thus, to solve the mental health issue, whether it’s creating a call to action, influencing their thinking and decision, making or targeting some kind of behaviour change, now focusing on developing the campaign messages according to each individual’s level of interest and influence. From the things we explored, I will further gain more insight of my design proposition.