Feeels - Motivational Design in Youth Mental Healthcare

Feeels session kits were created using exploratory design aiming to answer a clear need and validated by rapid prototyping and iterative field testing. Through close collaboration and UX methodolgies, they took form, with a new kind of professional toolkit for the provision of Youth Mental Health emerging. This hands-on consultation process is based here in Victoria, informing a set of ever-changing design needs that are explored in early-phase consultation with local practitioners.

By blending disciplines like psychology, neuroscience, and design thinking in the planning around each content theme, Feeels session kits aim to be visually engaging, emotionally motivating and grounded in evidence-based research (which is always cited for each kit). This unique combination of methodologies differentiates the offering from traditional therapeutic materials, helping to solve these complex communication challenges in ways that feel appropriate to a young, modern audience.

As a design piece, it grows from an industry landscape in Victoria with a strong appetite for inclusive, progressive and empathetic visual expression. All Feeels materials embrace this, featuring a signature monochrome world where characters express their experiences, feelings and unique quirks rather than perpetuating basic gender or cultural shorthands and broader stereotypes. The work’s tone and expression speaks to the lived experience of it’s creators, and aims to represent the experience of being human in an authentic way, alongside the theoretical principles it communicates.

The challenge of providing engaging psycho-education and support for youth mental health services is an ongoing mission that asks for a design framework and approach, not a single outcome. Feeels exists to imagine more effective solutions in this space, with inventive, empathetic, and user-centric design that is emblematic of the sophisticated communications landscape it emerged from, here in Victoria. It aims to keep doing that, both now, and in the future to come.

This project called for a big picture viewpoint, one informed by real world challenges in mental health delivery to create better design outcomes for it’s provision to young people today. Rather than considering discrete parts in isolation (like a making single worksheet), Feeels looks at a whole episode of care for a young person, breaking out important themes into sessions, establishing the aims of these and designing to communicate them effectively for the specific audience.

With consideration for the highly curated, branded experience design young people in 2024 frequently encounter, Feeels session kits each layer a number of simple print components to create an in-person experience that is cohesive and engaging. This blend of accessible language, inclusive visuals, and activities that connect with play (and pay deference to digital experiences), results in a fit-for-purpose set of designed outcomes tailored to the developmental stages and social contexts of youths aged 12-25. This supports better therapeutic outcomes and strengthens the therapeutic alliance between practitioners and young clients.

Feeels pays tribute to the kind of design excellence the Victorian design industry is well positioned to foster—the innovation mindset, strong cross-industry collaboration, a focus on pro-social outcomes and the celebration of elevated design to enrich our communities and lives. This project in particular embraces these, and clearly shows the benefits design can offer beyond just aesthetic consideration. Through deep collaboration on the communication challenges and experience design of therapy provision, new outcomes are defined that still use simple materials, embrace an ’easy to reproduce’ but highly distinctive outcome, and explore inclusive visual representations that focus more on the reader themselves.

By addressing the shortcomings of traditional therapeutic materials with a user-centered, evidence-based content approach, Feeels not only enhances the effectiveness of mental health services but also promotes wider adoption of design-driven solutions in healthcare.

Feeels uses modern communication, product and experience design principles expressed through a hand-drawn world to meet the identified need for better packaging and marketing of EBTs—a critical factor in enhancing their usability and effectiveness. The monochrome style, current, accessible language and inclusive visuals are hallmarks of the project, and aim to enhance the familiarity and context of a person-centred therapeutic environment. By providing a consistent visual language and communication approach, these kits create a more structured and effective framework for delivering psycho-education to young clients. This aligns with academic calls for design that prioritises ease of use, aesthetics, and fitness for purpose to get better outcomes.

By breaking away from dated viewpoints and assumptions, reducing emphasis on specific gendered character presentations and exploring challenging topics with curiosity and consideration, these kits democratise access to resources for modern youths seeking to develop further understanding around aspects of wellbeing, including identity, health and mood. The approach includes considerations largely overlooked historically (such as gender identity and diversity) and approaches content with more sensitivity for the current social landscape of Australia today. Avoiding particular socioeconomic and racial characteristics by maintaining a fantasy world of characters further minimises the potential for these resources to alienate, and speaks to the inclusivity the project embraces.

Each kit is designed to integrate seamlessly into existing therapeutic practices, offering an easily scalable solution that can be widely adopted. Each pack includes appropriate supporting research (with full citation), reflections, a delivery guide and quick production cheat sheet, showing how all the parts work to enhance that topic or intervention method, with cohesive modular parts the practitioner can use to tailor their delivery approach. This flexible set of tools reduces the burden on mental health professionals, allowing them to focus more on building rapport and delivering interventions.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of increased effectiveness in early intervention tools for youth mental health. Work in this area offers significant obvious benefits, evidenced by research linking depression alleviation to enhanced social cohesion and broader societal impacts. Given most mental health conditions present before the age of 25, improving deployment, ease and effectiveness in early intervention also has innumerable down-stream impacts for the Victorian community (and beyond).

Studies underscore that better mental health correlates with improved interpersonal relationships, community engagement, and cooperation among individuals. This fosters a healthier, more cohesive community fabric, in turn promoting empathy and resilience. Effective mental health support creates a ripple effect of positive outcomes across a community, and targeting youth care offers an early intervention strategy that supports a highly vulnerable cohort and amplifies time for the benefits and positive contributions of this to be seen. The project also supports those working within a high burnout / stress career path with improved resourcing that’s extremely easy to adopt, and fits to established best practice care.

The overall design considers the minimum environmental footprint the outcomes can feasibly make by leveraging print-on-demand benefits. Materials are produced only as needed, reducing excess inventory and waste. This approach lowers carbon emissions associated with transportation and storage and offers the ability to use recycled and sustainable materials easily in production, further lessening their ecological impact.

The project also commits a portion of each sale to Australia-based youth charities, as well as providing a classic cognitive behavioural therapy resource for practitioners to use as a community resource open source. Feeels embodies the values of it’s two founders, both products of Victorian culture, education, resources and community, who are now proudly creating in return. This project is a humble building block in the world they hope to see.

Feeels session kits offer a considered outcome that uses the minimum environmental footprint while still remaining equitable, effective and accessible.

The design of the Session Kits responded to a challenge to provide a superior product that looked just as good as a professionally produced piece of print education when produced using at home printing and limited skills. To do this they use widely available local formats and clever design choices to allow practitioners to use on-hand resources to make high quality outcomes easily, reducing the need for factory production, shipping, transport emissions and overstock waste.

Considerations often necessary to create polished brand outcomes (like colour control and quality consistency) were considered in the original brief. Necessity is the mother of invention, so iconic features like the monochromatic design and specific A4 and US Letter formats are actually responses to these constraints. Lower waste of ink by offering a single colour printed outcome is an additional consideration, with no quality or communication improvements offered by more expensive and resource intense full colour printing.

Feeels aims to embrace longevity and flexibility by design. Information and education resources are made to be easily reusable and worksheets to be filled in can be provided as seperate items. The session kits are modular and provided as a series of parts, so if a single sheet is updated, it is simply a new file version for future printing, not a book that needs replacing or other physical item that becomes waste. In having no packaging, plastics or other materials, any physical parts the product creates are easily recycled (or created using recycled parts!)

By prioritising environmental impact reduction, longevity, and adaptability, Feeels youth mental health interventions pay deference to areas of deep concern in young people today, like climate anxiety and future stewardship.