Megumi Lee
I am an interior designer interested in improving people’s experience of interior space and shaping their quality of living in the future, especially for senior citizens and their well-being. My graduate project, ‘Phases’, aims to help patients to re-discover self-values and also to destigmatize the mental health environment in society as well. Senior citizens can experience a new journey in their life in this psychiatric rehabilitation home through a variety of playful therapies and sharing common spaces for interactions as healing.
Phases
Senior psychiatric survivor experience to rehabilitate
Phases is a psychiatric rehabilitation home for the elderly to destigmatize mental health treatments and environments through various playful therapies and sharing common spaces for gaining interaction with inpatients. It gives a place for the elderly patients to re-discover the values of self and to learn living with illnesses and debilitations, allowing them to light up the way in a supportive treatment environment.
Older adults have high rates of suicide (Heisel & Duberstein, 2005). Facing pains of loss such as careers and relationships and physical illnesses when getting old, it is common for geriatric people to have various levels of mental health conditions. However, the elderly are often reluctant to mention their emotional difficulties due to pride and prejudice. The Phase aims to use different approaches to comfort and strength the internal and external conditions via spatial decompression and multisensory affordances.
Concept of Phases
Phase means any stage in the process of development. It also represents a conceptual scheme of ‘Five phases’ (including metal, water, wood, fire, and earth) in this project which come from a traditional Chinese philosophy to explain interactions and relationships between phenomena and the life cycle. With additional two elements (sun and moon) as seven elements to describe cosmic agents of change. In Phases, seven elements are applied to seven buildings to present the divisions of space and their characteristic.
Phases emphasize the inter-promoting and inter-regulating among the multi-optional treatments to achieve a balance mentally and physically. According to the characters and functions of therapies, they are categorized into elements and separated into buildings.
Earth is to focus on thinking training, a library for bibliotherapy and an art studio for art therapy are set here. As an outpatient building, it also has a main reception, a cafe on G/F and several consultation rooms on 1/F.
Wood is associated with plant-related activities. Aromatherapy and horticulture therapy are set in this area for the promotion of self-soothing. Crisp sounds from metal easily associate with musical instruments. Therefore music therapy and senior theatre are in this building to encourage emotional expression and social interactions.
Moon is a building for the exhibition of displaying patients’ artworks. The ranges of artworks are various, from paintings of paper sliding doors to flower arrangements. A hybrid of modern and traditional Japanese tearoom styles is applied here to encourage users to enjoy the artwork with a cup of tea or a whole tea ceremony instead of only spending several minutes on every artwork.
