AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Body
GOALS
Good Health & Well-being
KEYWORDS
Design therapy, Behavioral disorders, happiness
COUNTRY
Italy
DESIGNED BY
I am nominating myself.
I am Silvia Neretti and "The Unhappiness Repairer" was my Master Thesis project. I graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2014, from the Social Design department. I am currently a first year Ph.D. student at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at the Arizona State University.
The Unhappiness Repairer was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship in 2015, Core77 Award Nominee for Speculative and Service Design Projects in 2015, and Gjis Bakker and Keep An Eye On Talents Grant Nominee in 2014.
WEBSITE
http://silviapillow.com/The-Unhappiness-Repairer
The Unhappiness Repairer
A new design practice that modifies everyday life objects function to help people change behaviors.
The Unhappiness Repairer is a project, PhD research and future practice that combine design, therapy and behavior change techniques for behavior and mental health care.
Its aim is to explore the relation between everyday life objects and space and mental health: objects and spaces influence human behavior, therefore I aim to explore how objects can heal human behavior.
Objects and space functions and affordances, whether responsible for it or not, let the users perpetrate behaviors (harming or not). The hypothesis is that by physically modifying the context through modification of objects functions, the user is forced to change his/her usual actions and behaviors. The user has to experience and perform his/her context differently, as a stranger would do, to build new actions and healthier behavioral patterns and choices in the context in which the mental or behavioral struggle started.
The practice aim is to improve mental health and habits of users in already-existing places.