Clear House, Clear Mind
Clara Monteiro Gonçalves
See it On Campus: Level 2
ECU Health Design Award for Innovation — Winner
The Project
Clear House, Clear Mind is a year long exploration of executive dysfunction in the home, and how that shapes an individual’s self-esteem and sense of value. It’s been a project built primarily on reflective research culminating in empathetic narrative building that seeks to showcase the small and large ways this impairment affects day-to-day while also lending normalcy to these struggles.
The Problem Space
Managing a home is a complex affair made up of a network of activities, tasks and lists that one must keep track of. Unfortunately, organization, planning and all the small processes that make it are intirsically tied to your executive functions.
That is why this project aimed to investigate this intersection and its effects on the mental health of young people.
Concept
Working within the space of mental health and health design, there were a couple of boxes to tick when it came to the visual language of the project. It had to be personable, approachable, and relatable; the project’s target audience were people in their twenties, and were now taking on the brunt of home management from chores to the larger planning that goes around maintaining your own household.
Most importantly, though, were the central characters of Clear House, Clear Mind. This crew had to be diverse, encompass a breadth of experiences and identities within the main age group while also critically considering stereotypes surrounding the topic. That is how the Clear House Crew was born.
The Story
It is widely accepted that fiction is one of the easiest ways to develop empathy; being put in another’s shoes and walking a mile in them can help other’s understand other perspectives. To say Clear House, Clear Mind is an empathetic storytelling project might have been redundant, but its true meaning is to present these stories empathetically as well. It looks not to excuse behaviour, but to shine a kinder light on the underlying struggles that might fuel hard habits to break.
Want to read Clear House, Clear Mind?
Application
In reality, Clear House, Clear Mind is meant as a continuous project, existing primarily within the digital world, where people can engage with its stories and send in their own, it’s the prototype of an effective campaign that could be run through university channels or independently to help people with executive dysfunction.
