Crafting for Design in Mental Health: Personalisation, Participation and Production

Synopsis

The idea of ‘crafting’ has gained significant attention in studies of design and manufacturing processes in recent years. Design in mental health is a specialised practice, placing particular demands on how design and architectural projects are approached and emphasising the pivotal role of mental health service users. Design may also be directly informed by biographies and lived experience; it is not uncommon for members of the Design in Mental Health Network to express a personal stake in their work. In this paper I want to consider how the idea of ‘crafting’ might help to make this relationship between design and lived experience more visible. Specifically, I want to focus on three key practices: 1) the ways in which staff seek to modify the built environment through projects which personalise ward space in ways that are meaningful to both service users and staff; 2) how service user participation in art projects can be understood as a form of crafting which intervenes within the inpatient space rather than as a therapeutic practice; 3) the extent to which the idea of crafting can be enable an alternative approach to personalisation and what the scope is for expanding this idea within the standards which govern design choices within inpatient settings.