With this tool you can map out your family, relationships and life events, it will help create self-insight and is useful in communication with others.
Hard Facts, Soft Interpretations
This project is a form of data-therapy, in which you can shape and direct your life story. Large and small events in life affect the person you become. With this tool you can map out your family, relationships and life events, it will help create self-insight and is useful in communication with others.
Drempelprijs Commercial Practices 2017 and Second BA Research Award
Jury Drempelprijs:
"The winner has started from herself and worked to a design that could be of any meaning. The final product fits her vision of the future and gives her more opportunities." Read the full Commercial Practices jury report.
Jury Research Award:
"This project is a therapeutic toolkit for children in psychiatric treatment. It combines subjective and objective perspective, with a good balance of distance and methodological rigour on the one hand and engagement on the other. It involves the textbook use of external expertise, and experience experts are intelligently used as sources."
Hard Facts, Soft Interpretations
Poster
Growing up with a parent with mental problems can be challenging from youth right through adulthood. In the Netherlands, more than half a million children grow up in a family where one or both parents cope with mental problems. They often live in isolation and sometimes are burdened by the pledge of secrecy. As a result of that, problems stay behind the closed doors. There is also a chance that these children will grow up in an environment where the basic needs are not fully provided. Compared to children who grow up without being exposed to mental problems in the family, these children have a 3 to 15 times greater chance to develop the mental problems of their own.
In conversation with the young adults growing up in families like this, I have searched for a way to communicate about this complex topic. Taking my own story as a starting point, I tried to explain visually why this project is so important to me, as well as for others.
During this research, my visual storytelling evolved. I used a table-sized timeline as a conversation starter. This resulted in very personal visual stories. The sound recorded during these conversations gives more in-depth information about the complexity of this topic, and of life.
'Hard Facts, Soft Interpretations' is a form of data-therapy, in which you can shape and direct your life story. Large and small events in life affect the person you become. With this tool you can map out your family, relationships and life events, it will help create self-insight and is useful in communication with others.
