Design Challenge
#3: How might we learn from COVID-19 to reimagine our future for life, work, learning and play?
Project Description
Safe distancing is more prominent these days due to COVID-19 community outbreak. But people safe-distance all the time. Even though we distance ourselves, due to lack of trust or sense of danger, we still need to express ourselves. This project offers three online classrooms where three guest artistes teach participants how to make art, writing and comics as a way of sharing life’s big and small joys and pains. Designed to be publicly shared, selected works will be posted on SAMH social media pages.
Criteria #1: Value
Some people are safe distancing to protect their physical health, others do the same to protect their emotional and psychological health. Worlds are also being created online, on social media and other networking platforms. But do people have a safe space online to learn and to experiment with expressing themselves, before broadcasting their thoughts, feelings, opinions, lives, to the general public? Our online classrooms provide this safe and nurturing space to ease newcomers into expressing themselves confidently online.
Criteria #2: Inspiration
Most people love SPAM (the ham), that meaty taste. We dislike people spamming us, but we often ”spam” (aka express to) the ones we feel comfortable with (dare I say, love). Online the world wide web, there’s a sense of “sum-pah”, a local Malay phrase commonly used to say “I swear I didn’t do it.” What this means is most online interactions often feel weightless, transient, untrustworthy. How can we boost the communicativeness of the online environment? By teaching others how to create effective art, writing and comics for personal expression.
Criteria #3: Impact
As an online learning opportunity with a classroom setting, participants who sign up can benefit through group pollination and learning from artistes well-versed in their respective fields. Participants can work on their art, writing or comics before publishing them online to encourage, resonate, comfort others during these COVID-19 pandemic times. During the registration process, we will target both newbie artists who have not yet gone on social media, and people who work or move around in social circles where voices need to be amplified.
Criteria #4: Timeliness
As this is part of a team effort by the creative team at Singapore Association for Mental Health (SAMH), we have resources to launch this within 3 to 6 months. There are also ready online resources such as Google Classrooms that we can use as a prototype for this first phase, before developing our own platform, if necessary, in future. We could also engage 3-6 artistes in art, writing and comics fields to help supplement their incomes during these difficult times and put their expertise to good use. Our team can participate to provide mental health advisory, education and support.
Criteria #5: Systems Thinking
Firstly, the online world is becoming more and more a way and fact of life for everyone. This project begins to think about how we can teach people to express themselves effectively and powerfully online. Secondly, we have a lot of freelance artists in Singapore with a lot of talent that should be more widely publicized, should teach and pass on their knowledge to others. This project encourages new artists and artists new to social media as participants, and engages experienced artists during unemployment to teach others. Thirdly, we are a mental health organization that can sense and observe any new distress trends suggested by participant expressions
.