Abstract
Psychiatric care environments are intended to heal, yet their design is often experienced as stigmatizing. This paper presents the Uncovering and Designing for Dignity through Emotions (UDDE) method, a participatory approach designed to uncover the meaning of dignity for perinatal women in psychiatric care, explore lived experiences of stigma and dignity, and identify how care features can be re-designed to uphold dignity. While dignity is often defined as an inherent worth every person possesses, in everyday life dignity is experienced as a lived value shaped by interactions with others and the environment. Emotions act as biological signals that can reveal when dignity is maintained or violated and serve as a bridge between the abstract concept of dignity and lived experience. The UDDE method consists of six interconnected activities to visualize experiences and transform stigmatizing interactions into ones that better address what perinatal women in psychiatric care truly value and need.
Keywords
dignity; participatory design; socially-engaged design; women’s health
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1463
Citation
Heuvelmans, C., Günay, A., Ludden, G., and Sturge, J. (2026) Designing for Dignity: A Method to Explore Emotional Lived Experiences of Stigma and Dignity in Perinatal Mental Health Environments, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1463
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Designing for Dignity: A Method to Explore Emotional Lived Experiences of Stigma and Dignity in Perinatal Mental Health Environments
Psychiatric care environments are intended to heal, yet their design is often experienced as stigmatizing. This paper presents the Uncovering and Designing for Dignity through Emotions (UDDE) method, a participatory approach designed to uncover the meaning of dignity for perinatal women in psychiatric care, explore lived experiences of stigma and dignity, and identify how care features can be re-designed to uphold dignity. While dignity is often defined as an inherent worth every person possesses, in everyday life dignity is experienced as a lived value shaped by interactions with others and the environment. Emotions act as biological signals that can reveal when dignity is maintained or violated and serve as a bridge between the abstract concept of dignity and lived experience. The UDDE method consists of six interconnected activities to visualize experiences and transform stigmatizing interactions into ones that better address what perinatal women in psychiatric care truly value and need.