Move Your Feeling, Heal Yourself: Dance Movement Therapy Space

Duration: Jun 2022 - Sep 2022

Design: VR interactive therapy space for emotional abuse

Focus: psychology; neuroscience; women’s rights; digital health and wellbeing

Role: therapy designer, spacial designer and experience designer

Design Outcomes: service system design, interaction design, experience design

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Design Challenge, Goal and Outcome

Many women are suffering from emotional abuse in relationships; the most obvious symptom of it is cognitive dissonance. Patients need long-term treatment to eliminate cognitive dissonance caused by brain fog. This kind of trauma is difficult to be solved by traditional communication-style psychological counseling. As people who have experienced the same emotional trauma, through the dance movement therapy (DMT) experiments and theories, I have proven the DMT is very helpful and efficient for healing psychological trauma.

In this project, I came up with a therapy strategy and system that combined dance movement design, spatial design, and interaction design to provide a holistic trauma therapy service.

These spaces act as a dance movement therapist, analyzing and guiding users healing movements. And producing real-time interactions with people. People can learn dance movements to deal with psychological trauma in this space.

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Design Process and Outcomes

• Psychological research, experiments, theraphy strategy

Patients who receive dance movement therapy experience the following effects: release, which includes promoting relaxation and the parasympathetic nervous system; activation of the self-relationship, which involves a sense of connection to the body and self; and facilitation of symbolic self-expression.

Based on theoretical research, I conducted experiments on treatment strategies and ultimately selected actions that can bring significant psychological benefits during the experiment as the key practice actions in the treatment.

In addition, the therapy strategy that I designed allows the interactive space to assist users in guiding a treatment cycle. The user can interact with the space, which represents their key mental status by the specified therapeutic movements, in order to deal with their truma by body (movement). This space will also analyze your movements to guide you move.

• Interactive space as a therapist

Users will use cameras and head-mounted devices when using virtual VR spaces. The actions taken by users in the interactive space will be recognized by the space, and then the system will analyze the psychological state based on the action state (people's actions are manifestations of their psychological state), and generate therapeutic objects in the interactive space.

Users will be guided by the action coach in the virtual space to perform some therapeutic actions on the therapeutic object, gradually healing their psychological problems under the guidance of the system.

• User experience Design: therapy process

Users will experience three treatments for three key psychological issues each time they enter the healing system, which includes promoting relaxation and the parasympathetic nervous system; activation of the self-relationship, which involves a sense of connection to the body and self; and facilitation of symbolic self-expression.

In the service blueprint, you can see how the interactive space system identifies, analyzes, and outputs guided user behavior in the front-end, back-end, and back-end to achieve healing every time.

• Collection of treatment data and treatment plan

After each healing session, users can see their psychological state through objects representing their psychological state in the interactive space. Visualizing emotions can help users understand their psychological state and enhance their understanding of emotions. The system will also analyze all the user's movement and psychological data to propose future treatment plans.

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Reflection

As an interdisciplinary designer, I have been striving to enhance the diversity of spatial design and consider whether it can provide new value to society in the digital era. When designing this space, I combined the thinking of psychology and digital interaction design to propose a psychological healing space design that endows the space with more possibilities, enables the space to serve more functions, and meets the diverse needs of users.

The times are changing, and I will always think about the boundaries and integration of disciplines. Perhaps everything is connected, and we will usher in an era of interdisciplinary integration and collaboration.

Thanks for reading :) I am willing to share more information about the project with you. If you would like to read the entire project content, please send an email to bessiepak@gmail.com

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