Transformative Design

Packard Children’s Hospital

Adapt patient belief systems and actions

Role

Art Therapist

Year

1998–1999

Impact

Artmaking became a useful tool for patients to continue recovery after hospital

Design Challenge: develop therapeutic relationships with anorexic girls to assist healing journeys.

Result: visual-narrative therapy made meaning and created self-understanding that assisted patients to change self-destructive beliefs and actions, regain health, and be released from hospital.

After years at NeXT Computer, I wanted deeper involvement in crafting visual stories. I spent six months in animation school developing story lines that were attuned to relationship dynamics. A wise teacher suggested that psychology might be my next career step. I completed an MFC and became an art therapist to anorexic girls. The creative process became a platform to develop therapeutic methods.

I began a PhD in clinical psychology at this time, intending to develop new software tools for eating disorders. I understood user interface design from NeXT. The intersection of creativity and medical applications became a powerful purpose.

“Anorexia brought a sense of strength and accomplishment that I can do the impossible. Art helps me express anger. I might ask for art therapy in the outpatient clinic.” — A 14-year-old art therapy client

Illustrated cottage in a forest, artwork created during a patient's art therapy — A symbolic digital artwork from a patient in art therapy holds hidden stories that became the basis for therapeutic conversations.

Pencil sketch of a faceless figure and a separate detailed eye study — A drawing about having no identity while being vigilant about abusive family members.

Colored pencil painting of a dark spiral with bursts of orange and green — A patient’s art therapy painting about repressed emotion and a feeling of spiraling into depression, “my life going down the drain.”