Process
In ‘Not quite 100′ we worked with caregivers and people with schizophrenia in twelve psychiatric wards. To get a broad view, the included living environments are an observation and a rehabilitation ward, sheltered housing, a psychiatric care home, a day-care hospital and a sheltered workplace. For the design research we choose Cultural Probes because of their advantages considering the condition of schizophrenia. Cultural Probes are a specially designed collection of engaging and challenging assignments, physical objects and tasks, using creative ways to elicit responses from people about their everyday life. The Probes are dropped in the respondent’s living environment and returned to the designer after a while (Gaver et al., 1999). For the development of the Probes the teams visited several psychiatric wards to get a broader view of everyday life. Specific requirements of the condition of schizophrenia, the vulnerabilities, limitations and possibilities to consider in the research were discussed during a training day by the psychiatrist Dr. Marc De Hert.
A workshop with critical designers Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen was organised to support the students in creating challenging Probes for people with schizophrenic symptoms. Each team designed Probes for their specific ward that were approved by the staff before introducing them to the respondents. The Probe returns were used to inspire concepts for media designs, further developed in an iterative process involving staff and respondents.