Industrial Design meets mental healthcare: Designing products involving game-elements for mental healthcare therapy — Three case studies

Industrial Design originally focused on product development. However, since a decade the attention has extended from design for products to design for users, design for experiences and design for emotions. Recently, several projects have been initiated to design products to be used in the application area of mental healthcare - ultimately aiming at an improvement of the patient´s Quality of Life by improving their emotion regulation. All these projects involve specific game elements but the designed products are not necessarily digitally. The projects share a design strategy that involves input from clinical practitioners and patients. This paper presents an overview of three projects. The first project has the aftercare of cancer patients as its topic. After breast cancer treatment, a large population of patients suffers from severe fatigue obstructing them to pick up their old life. A product was developed using the game elements tangible interaction and challenge to increase their energy management. The second project has a clinical group of soft-drugs addicted youth as its target group. The developed product aimed to increase their therapy adherence using game elements social coherence and tangible interaction. The third project has burn-out patients as a target group. The prototype consists of an online-game that aims to improve the patient´s self-esteem and behavior. The used game-element is virtuality and amount of control. Gradually the game transgresses from low-interaction abstract games to high-interactive realistic role-playing. All projects have been evaluated by the respective patient groups.