DrawnOut! Mental Health Sketch Workshop

Synopsis

This interactive workshop revolves around the stories of an architectural designer and her lived experience and a healthcare planner whose family experienced a loved one in crisis and the ripple effect on their lives. Through the lens of sketching of the inpatient psychiatric units both experienced as both patient and visitor, they share best practices and evidence-based design strategies for mental health environments. Participants are paired off and given an empathy exercise to help mitigate bias and built a rapport around a patient persona experiencing post-partum depression. The paired participants use these collective inputs to sketch a visitation suite, typically the only area of inpatient psychiatric hospital the public can experience. These sketches are shared in a rapid fire, round-robin style crit that fosters an open dialogue around stigma, design and hope. Together we can defy stigma by design. This workshop has been featured 4 times in North America, with each batch of sketches collected for a future exhibit.