Carechat
An infrastructural solution to mental health problems on college campuses
Duration
4 Weeks
April - May 14, 2019
Project Feature
Mental wellbeing
Infrastructure for safety
Emotional Design
My Role
Research
Concept Development
Visual design
Prototyping
Team
Yixi Liu
Cecilia McLaren
Sylvia Zhang
Eve Wongworakul
Background
In the past four years, two people I know in college passed away due to suicides. Though we will never know what exactly led to their deaths, I learned that they used to suffer from serious depression. The immediate shock of their deaths led me to take mental illness seriously.
American college students are at the forefront of a national crisis; in the past two decades, the prevalence of mental health issues has skyrocketed among young people. Students born in the 1990s and 2000s are lonelier, sadder, and more anxious than their older counterparts.
The situation in NYU is particularly concerning — at least 18 students have committed suicide since 1990.
The Challenge
How might we build a trustworthy, convenient, and private communication space for the NYU community to help one another out with their mental illness issues?
The Solution
Mesh-network based counseling and a zine-style user-manual
How I got there?
01 — Exploration
NYU mental counseling service
As the demand for mental health services rises, NYU has scrambled to provide solutions. Certainly, many people have benefitted from their services. However, many students have reported troubling encounters, and despite the significant resources allocated for this purpose, NYU has since continued to have many incidences of student and staff suicides.
NYU Health Center
provides clinical support for students diagnosed with mental illness. Students can either make appointments with the schools’ counselors or get referrals to other services outside the campus. They also provide drop-in sessions for a quick 15 minutes counseling for new visitors.
Pros: Provide professional and medical solutions to mental health issues. This is a reliable place to visit.
Cons: It is highly inaccessible. The registration and steps could be frustrating and students usually decide not to go.
NYU Wellness Exchange
proclaims to provide 24/7 consulting services for students suffering from mental issues. Students can either dial-in the hotline or use the app to chat online to talk to an accredited counselor anonymously.
Pros: It is anonymous, meaning that students’ privacy is protected. It is therefore easier to speak up. It is quick and convenient to use.
Cons: It does not provide an in-person experience. Speaking on the phone or texting fails to address such psychological needs of intimacy and warmth.
Interview with NYU students
We talked to 10 NYU students who have experience using the mental wellbeing services NYU provides and was able to learn their concerns and issues with the current services
02 - Research and Literature Inspirations
“Blue-light emergency phones on campus: Media infrastructures of feeling” by Elizabeth Ellcessor
In the article, Ellcessor approached blue-light emergency phones from a media intervention perspective, arguing that the light is a highly visible, material, and public communications infrastructure that becomes signs of safety to assuage fears. She calls this “an infrastructure of feeling” - producing affective experiences of “safety.” By setting up the lights all over campus, the simple visuality/materiality of the light helps to provide a physical promise of ‘safety’ towards those in need of potential help on campus.
“Gay Travels Through Syria and Iran: How I learned to stop worrying and love my Bluetooth.” by Mark O’ Halloran
Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances using UHF radio waves.
In the article, Halloran talks about how the gay community in Syria uses Bluetooth to screen out users who are too far away from the signal. In a country where homosexuality is not only ignominious but also punishable, members of the LGBTQ+ community have resorted to using Bluetooth devices to communicate with one another clandestinely but also intimately.
03 — Opportunities
By looking at the interviews and the articles, we gained four main insights to develop our design interventions.
04 — Technical Research
The key to our success is finding the right technology. As the insights have shown, we need a technology that is physical and could provide a private and local network on the campus. This finding led us to mesh network.
Mesh network
Constructing Private, local network
A local network topology in which the infrastructure nodes connect directly. The network is confined within a certain geographical region and does not go through any ISPs or the school. It, therefore, prevents students from being surveilled.
The routers
The visible, material component
We want to place the routers in areas where students can see them as a reminder that mental health services are always available, and they have a secure, digital space to access in times of need.
Testing& Prototyping
Setting up mesh network routers
In our Critical Making class, our guest speaker Zach, from NYC Mesh, talked about how such mesh networks were set up in neighborhoods across the city, which helped people communicate in a private setting. Later in the period, we were taught to set up a mini-network in our classroom with four routers set up on the same floor. The exercise was overall very informative and fun.
In-class chatroom
We used a mesh network chat room to communicate with each other.
Once connected to the mesh network, we could go to its private websites, such as the IP address check website and the chat room. Individuals connected to this mesh network were all enabled to talk anonymously in the chat room, which was pretty fun. Yet the connection was not quite stable, and sometimes group members could not see one another and thus could not respond in time.
05 — Final Design
Mesh network router with pink light
The visibility of mental health care is key to provide students a sense of caring, intimacy, and community. Students could feel more connected to the service as a support system through a commonality of visibility. The Wellness Center itself feels very removed, almost like an entirely different entity. We want to place the routers in areas where students can see them as a reminder that mental health services are always available.
We also designed each of our routers to cover a radius of 100 feet, which means that the student will be chatting with a professional counselor or volunteer knowing that this person is physically proximate. This design adds to the materiality of our service, enhancing the “infrastructure of feeling” of safety and community.
Care Chat App
The mesh network-based chat room can be anonymous since the users do not need to provide any personal information such as name, NetID, password, etc. It allows only those with access codes to connect to the wifi network and access the app, ensuring that those with the wrong intentions will not be able to access the application.
The User-Manuel Zine
Our zine mainly offers a guide for users to connect to the local mesh network and use the app. Since our target audience is the NYU student populace who struggle with mental illness, we would like to make the guide appear professional, yet fun and approachable so that the users will not be afraid to open themselves up to the app.
After we finished writing the content of the zine, we also drew cartoonized images on a drawing tablet to be placed next to the text to connote a sense of friendliness. We made sure we selected fonts that appear the most handwritten because we also want the zine to have the raw, handmade element to it.
Moreover, we chose pink to be the color of the zine’s background as it relates to the pink light idea we wanted to discuss in the zine itself. A zine that appears too professionally made will not suit the local nature of the zine, especially one that caters to college students.
06 - Reflection
Though it is intuitive to think of Washington Square or Kimmel as “NYU Commons”, it is equally important to put routers close to/in student housing for those who might not be able to leave their apartments or residence halls. For the area that is not initially covered by our network (i.e. other NYU campuses), we hope to expand to those areas through grassroots efforts. The concern of “trolling” came up too, and it is, unfortunately, very difficult to keep trolls from taking advantage of safe spaces, though we try to ensure security by adding another layer of password protection to the “friend who wants to help” and professional counselor options. Trolling is a general apprehension we have surrounding most media platforms, and I think it has led to a general distrust among online media users.