Exploring Critical Transition Design Practice to unmask, challenge and shift culturally held beliefs about mental health.

Abstract

This study explores Critical Transition Design Practice to unmask, challenge and shift culturally held beliefs about design practice and mental health. Critical Design and Transition Design Practice both draw attention to the ways in which the design industry affirms, rather than transitions the status quo. Critical Theory offers insight into this, explaining how culturally held beliefs, used to guide design decision-making, can be mistaken as naturally held beliefs and as such go unchallenged. By placing Critical Theory at the heart of Critical Transition Design Practice, design practitioners and participants can expose the historical, cultural construction of their own beliefs and the role their own understandings play in affirming or changing given situations. Furthermore, Critical Transition Design, utilises an Ethic of Care to step change how ‘care’ is understood. ‘Care’ is understood as an alternative innate, historically devalued human disposition. This framing of ‘care’ foregrounds how we have a moral responsibility to each other and therefore a moral responsibility to expose the historical and cultural construction of beliefs that can unknowingly reinforce established power differences or reproduce inequalities. Prominent in the public consciousness, one could believe that mental health is understood more than ever but Critical Theory unmasks the dominant forms of oppression present in constructing beliefs about mental health. Whilst there are some studies that explore the navigation of beliefs in the design of mental health services, there is limited knowledge about employing Critical Transition Design Practice, anchored in an Ethic of Care to shift oppressive mental health beliefs. This study addresses the gap.

Critical Realism is adopted as the research paradigm. Fundamental to this paradigm is the assumption of an objective reality, acknowledging that human beings are often unable to fully understand or witness this reality. Critical Participatory Action Research forms the methodological approach, which enables the researcher to canvas experiences of participants involved in the research. This eight-year study draws from evidence gathered from the researcher, students, volunteers and directors of a Mental Health Recovery College. The findings detail how a designer unknowingly mistakes culturally held beliefs for naturally held beliefs, limiting their practice to affirmative change making. Despite beginning as affirmative design, the findings highlight that design’s distinct culture, of making, doing and the abductive modes of reasoning offer promise to make non-affirmative change. This promise comes when attention is shifted from the external world of products and services to the internal world of attitudes and beliefs. The contribution of this research is significant to those who are interested in how design practice anchored in an Ethic of Care might be utilised to challenge culturally held beliefs and transition towards non-affirmative change.

Date of Award	27 Feb 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Mark Bailey (Supervisor)