Abstract
Despite the efforts of governments, psychotherapy remains underused. Drug prescriptions are rising continuously in developed countries. Startups emerged over the last years, offering mostly online therapy services, but they strengthen the divide between the ‘online’ and the ‘offline. To tackle the multifaceted problem of psychotherapy and to avoid ‘digital dualism’, the question we addressed during three years is: ‘What design can do for psychotherapy in a digital age?’ From Fall 2016 to Fall 2018, we offered five student cohorts to work on this question in design classes. In this paper, we explain what is the problem with psychotherapy (section 2), how we conducted the five studio classes in order to explore this problem (section 3) and what are the main ideas resulting from this exploration (section 4). Finally we discuss the results both from an educational and research perspective (section 5).
Keywords
Psychotherapy, Mental Health, e-Health, Design, Studio class
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.376
Citation
Vial, S., and Boudhraâ, S. (2020) Improving access to psychotherapy in a digital age: an exploratory design study based on five studio classes, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.376
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Improving access to psychotherapy in a digital age: an exploratory design study based on five studio classes
Despite the efforts of governments, psychotherapy remains underused. Drug prescriptions are rising continuously in developed countries. Startups emerged over the last years, offering mostly online therapy services, but they strengthen the divide between the ‘online’ and the ‘offline. To tackle the multifaceted problem of psychotherapy and to avoid ‘digital dualism’, the question we addressed during three years is: ‘What design can do for psychotherapy in a digital age?’ From Fall 2016 to Fall 2018, we offered five student cohorts to work on this question in design classes. In this paper, we explain what is the problem with psychotherapy (section 2), how we conducted the five studio classes in order to explore this problem (section 3) and what are the main ideas resulting from this exploration (section 4). Finally we discuss the results both from an educational and research perspective (section 5).