The Yellow Box
RCA Grand Challenge 2020/21
The RCA Grand Challenge is the biggest single-institution postgraduate design project in the world. It is an interdisciplinary collaborative event that runs each year across the entire School of Design. For 2020/21 the theme was Design for Safety. Nearly 400 postgraduate designers, in 77 teams of 5, conceived and developed design responses that explored, challenged or improved the practice, culture, principles and ethics of Design for Safety.
The RCA Grand Challenge 2020/21 was sponsored by Logitech. With contributors from: World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations, BBC, CERN, Gallup, Unreal Engine, Resilience Shift, Lloyd’s Register Foundation (LRF), vHM Design Futures, Foresight Factory.
Three prizes of £2,500 were awarded to the projects that best met the following criteria: ‘Is there magic?’, ‘Smartest Innovation’ and ‘Biggest potential impact’, and an additional prize of £1,000 to the project with the best narrative.
The Yellow Box
The Yellow Box won the Grand Challenge as one of the three winning projects. In addition, The Yellow Box also won the additional prize for the best narrative.
On behalf of the judging panel, Alastair Curtis (Chief Design Officer, Logitect) commented: “The project was incredibly well presented and incredibly simple. They did a fantastic job of identifying the problem but also providing a really compelling, simple solution. What resonated the most was that it was a solution that could be global”
Duration
3 Months
Team
5 Students – with background in Textile design, UX design, Product design and Service design
Role
As a part of this project my role was to serve as a researcher and service designer to ideate and speculate a strategic path forward for TheYellowBox.
The Challenge
How might we prepare the next generation to safely face emotional challenges and prevent mental health issues?
Research
Reflecting on the Covid19 pandemic, we conducted several interviews and secondary source research on recent studies. The lost in-person interaction due to the pandemic, made us realise that healthy conversations and interactions between people are vital for a better mental health.
The mental health problems caused by crisis and emotional challenges were clearly underserved. On exploring the reasons behind mental health problems caused by life’s challenges, we discovered the need to eliminate the fear of failure, and to start building resilience from a younger age. In order to prevent mental health problems, we must prepare an individual to handle emotional challenges, enabling them to find their own ways to arise.
Ideation
What are the different preventive measures that we come across in our daily life?
- Good touch/Bad touch
- Fire safety signage
- Sunscreens
- Smoke detectors
- Fuses
- Fragile tags
- Reflectors on road
- Low battery warning
- Emergency exits, etc..
The Final Concept
Educational Workshops
For children aged 7 – 12, TheYellowBox provides school workshops on mental health, conducted by professional psychiatrists. It involves interactive lessons on mental health coping mechanisms, using the physical first-aid kit tools as metaphors. Example – The stethoscope teaches how to be a good listener, listening to inner-self or others when they are emotionally weak.
Each tool represents different topics on mental health, teaching how it can be used to heal themselves and others during emotionally challenging situations. Having a physical interaction with the props stimulates anchoring and memory aid for the children.
Significance – having conversations about mental health with children is highly sensitive and involves the risk of triggering episodes. Using metaphors provides a safe way to explain these concepts and have playful interactions around the topic of mental health, and also anchors memory aid to remember them.
We designed the workshop experience in collaboration with psychiatrists and cognitive therapists. The week-long workshop covers a different topic on mental health each day, involving interactive activities and exercises. To continue the conversation at home, the children are given a takeaway kit, with detailed descriptions and a paper cutout version. Few weeks later, the children will have follow-up sessions to to reflect on how they used the tools in daily life.
We conducted a pilot workshop with children aged 7, 10 and 12 and had follow-up sessions 3 weeks later.
Public Safety Signage
In order to bring the systemic behavioural change, we have to help people remember those valuable lessons, considering how we can reinforce this knowledge in an accessible way. TheYellowBox proposes a public safety infrastructure with mental health safety signage (inspired by ISO 7010 standard), and bluetooth beacons, meaningfully placed in the built environment.
The signs are designed to provide thoughtful prompts; and to direct people to useful mental well-being resources. Each sign is sensitive to context and age. The Bluetooth beacons (in high-income settings) can trigger proactive safety experiences at high-risk places.
Significance – they normalise the topic of mental health and changes its perception among the public that emotional vulnerability is normal and common to all individuals.
Emergency and Care Tools
People often don’t know where to reach out during emotional emergencies. Even if they find advice, it is often complex and hard to process, especially during a moment of crisis. We must provide a simple and clear-to-navigate content, friendly to interact in high-stress moments.
The Yellow Box website provides in-the-moment help and well-being resources. It is a simple hierarchy for emergency advice and pointers to primary care and other organisations. In lower-resource settings, the content can be easily adapted to other media like SMS services.
Significance – its serves as a one-place to reach-out to in case of emotional emergencies in order to ease oneself or others. It provides clear and appropriate guidance to handle such difficult situations.
Click here to visit TheYellowBox wesite
The Story of Lars
Stakeholder map
Mental Health Ecosystem
Why is the ecosystem incomplete?
We have several organisations caring for mental health, but they are disjointed. The touchpoints between humans and the ecosystem are still not mandated, and hard to find. The clinical validity of some solutions is questionable.
The Yellow box connects the ecosystem, making it comprehensive, universal and ever-present. It simplifies access to information, and serves as the one place to go to. Most importantly it creates universal language heuristics for mental health. When introduced globally, the framework is adaptable to other cultural contexts and has the potential to create a global impact.
Next Steps
Moving forward, with further research and validation of systems components, we are establishing a panel of psychology experts to design trial workshops. We have planned a Pilot school workshop to gather evidence and feedback, with which we can approach local governments for borough level implementation, and reach out to organisations for collaborations.
Conclusion
In our calculations, complete worldwide treatment for mental health disorders is practically impossible. Therefore prevention is essential in the global toolkit. The Yellow Box not just reduces the human suffering, but also the economic burden, creating global productivity growth by prevention.