Wednesday the kick-off of the project Games4Therapy started. Games4Therapy is a project aims on designing a game that helps young adults aged around 18-28, who are having symptoms of psychosis.
Our team first met each other on Wednesday and it has been very interesting to hear what everyone does. We are a team of four people. First, there’s Susana Passinhas, an Interaction Designer from Portugal, finishing her Master’s Degree in Design and Multimedia at Coimbra’s University. She has worked as a Web Designer for the past years and enjoys the process of developing new concepts. Not only she likes the technological part of it, but also when it involves working with raw materials.
Then there’s Sebastiaan Broek. Sebastiaan is a 21 year old Media & Culture student from the university of Amsterdam, graduating in Digital Media at the MediaLAB. He is looking for creative solutions for issues concerning media. Sebastiaan likes to work together with – and learn from different cultures and has a wide interest in music and traveling.
Matias Daporta is our creative thinker and conceptionalist. He studied ballet, contemporary dance, theatre and filmmaking and also fashion design in Spain. In his current trajectory at the SNDO, university for choreography, in Amsterdam he tries to combine these realms, with special focus on the one common element they propose: the social encounter, repeated in time. He’s using theatre as a social experiment in which the audience and the performers are being tested, and that gives equal value to the influence of the presence of an audience towards a piece and vice versa.
Last but not least, there’s Gerdjan van Hagen. He’s a 22 year old Game Developer, specializing in Game Technology. Being in his graduation phase, he’s had a lot of experience designing and developing games and has worked as a Software Developer for about two years now. After graduating, he hopes to work in the serious game business.
Together, we hope to provide a solution to young adults who have had psychosis, whether the help will be through social acceptance, early detection, prevention or perhaps through other ways.
If you have any remarks or ideas, please let us know at games4therapy@gmail.com.
Day two
Kick-off week continued on day two, with insights in the projects and tips and hints from former MediaLAB students. It was really nice to see some designs and applications these students worked at for 20 weeks. The presentation about aspects of design that our coach Marco gave afterwards gave us some really interesting and helpful understandings about (Dutch) design.
Our first assignment for the Games4Therapy projects was to make a user scene, in which we explain the case to for instance our commissioner, in an understandable way. To get a better understanding of psychosis and its boundaries, we invited Louis, who has dealt with psychosis 18 months now. We spoke with him about his problem and his experiences. As a team, we all had a notion of the aspects of psychosis, but Louis was able to explain the effects of the psychosis on him much more clearly. It was really helpful to have him to reflect on our notion of psychosis, and our ideas for the user scene. At the moment, our user scene is in development and will be available this week.