Post 10
– By Ngoc Tram Nguyen-
My last draft proposition last week focused on the lack of access to Mental Healthcare service in Australia remote area as a result of a rising suicide rate in Tasmania. I proposed to create a messaging application that sends out text messages to improve young people’s moods base on a rating system they use every time they feel down.
After the feedback from tutors and classmates, there were a few insights that helped me move forward and shifted away from my initial draft:
- Redefine targets audiences and their struggles, specify their needs.
- What motivates the target audience to interact with the application?
- Consider how incidents can happen such as cyber bullying as an integral part when designing a service.
- Draw on a particular issue instead of moods in general, which can be too broad to handle.
I decided to look further into what Mental Illness highly influences a specific group of people in the remote area, and one of the problems raised up that was unemployment among this age groups.
My updated proposal:
Practice types:
Service design.
The Issues:
The remote area of Australia has been known for a high rate of suicide and other mental health illness. This might be a result of the isolation of the geography which can lead to a lack of community activities and access to mental health treatment. One of the factors that might contribute to this issue and have back and forth effect is unemployment. Rural Australia is also known to have very high rate of unemployment.
The target group and their problem:
The service targets young people (18-24 years old) who live in the remote area of Australia who have a high risk of suffering from mental illness because of their isolated living conditions and unemployed.
Design Solution:
Apps design that arranges meet up between experienced local employee and young people to talk and give advice on career and employment.
Design :
- Addressing the factors that led to mental illness among unemployed individuals in the remote area. Isolation, stress. The relationship between unemployment and mental illness.
- A combination of online platform and community support group.
- Physical interaction to provide social supports. Digital platform to keep up with communication and track the mental status of users.
- At the first stage, there will need social workers team to join and actively response to all the worries. After the society become strong and active itself, can move over to the administration of the site and make sure there is no cyberbullying and breach of online privacy.
The Challenges:
The challenge is this might be too complicated to manage and require a huge amount of work from social workers and society, which may hit the dead end of lack of funding and struggle in geographical isolation. Working toward to simplify the solution and focusing on solving one problem at once instead of finding one answer for all the questions. Further research and push to a simpler and direct solution.
Possible changes:
The design might improve the community interactions among individuals and expect to lower the rate of suicide of youth in Australia remote area. The success of the design might help guide other similar campaigns that targeting related issues in this area of the country for example illiterate.
P.s: In my final proposition, I combined both my draft and my updated draft proposal as long as simplified them to come up with a new proposal. The new service focuses on creating an online platform names The Black Box, where young people can share and helps each other improve their moods by replacing the down mood posts with and supports messages.
Emergent Practices 