DrawnOut! Mental Health Sketch Workshop series – Stantec Architecture

Nominee Information

The DrawnOut! Mental Health Sketch Workshop series is an ongoing education and advocacy effort to lift up lived experience, defy stigma by design and educate built environment & healthcare professions on mental health design. This workshop was born out of the AIA Strategic Council’s Mental Health+Architecture Incubator during the pandemic and brought together Stephen Parker and Shahad Sadeq around this critical topic. Their stories are a foil for the workshop. The lived experience of Shahad Sadeq, Assoc. AIA., an architectural designer admitted to a psychiatric facility for professional burnout who sketched her environment. Stephen Parker, a mental health planner at co-leading Stantec’s global Mental + Behavioral Health Practice, shares his experience with having a parent admitted for delusion paranoia and dementia. To process this collective trauma, Stephen and Shahad, alongside collaborators Emily Schnickner, crafted the DrawnOut! Mental Health Workshop. Leveraging sketching as means to express ideas on mental health, the workshop elevates design that can alleviate suffering, educating ourselves and other professionals in the process. Each workshop seeks to “draw out” those lessons learned from those with lived experience with sketching as a medium, educate others on best practices in mental health design and incubate ideas that defy stigma by design. These workshops have been hosted from Hawaii to England, collecting sketches shared on social media with the #MentalHealthSketch and an evolving exhibit, hoping to democratize this critical knowledge. The DrawnOut! Mental Health Workshop framework is straightforward and engaging. We begin by sharing the stories of Stephen and Shahad, how their respective experiences informed their perspectives and practices. Secondly, we share a number of broad best practices and example projects that elevate mental health design. Third, we pair off participants and engage in a patient persona task that helps the audience exercise empathy and overcome bias. Lastly, the pairs of participants develop sketches for a visitation suite based on the patient persona and share their insights in rapid, round-robin style crits. This crafts an incredibly engaging, insightful and uplifting experience for the sketchers of all skill levels and “draws out” innovative ideas, elevates diverse voices on this topic and galvanize participants to incorporate these ideas in their practices, agnostic of their typology. The DrawnOut! Mental Health Workshop series strives to elevate the lived experience voice, educate on mental health design and defy stigma by design.