Did you know that 3 out of 4 people report discussing COVID “often” as part of their daily experience? While the new Coronavirus has become a dominant theme in our lives, talking about community transmission levels, mask fashion, vaccine trials, and the inane politicization of illness might just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we are responding to new conditions of the everyday. Research conducted by the SCADpro team on the impact of COVID reveals how coping mechanisms reflect people’s underlying desire to feel that sense of connection, belonging, and control that keep us mentally and physically healthy.
During the course of the pandemic health professionals have warned about the looming health crisis created by stress and anxiety due to job losses, business closures, the social landscape, and even shortages of supplies and materials that we took for granted in the preCovid era. Findings from a national survey conducted by the SCADpro team supported the veracity of these concerns — for example, 57% of respondents reported being worried or stressed, while an additional 29% said they were both worried and stressed! The survey also revealed how individuals were trying to address unmet needs. SCAD students’ analyses of the data found that people are deploying a combination of active and passive strategies to care for themselves, their families, and their communities. Students participating in a SCADpro challenge employed Design Thinking to enhance the natural instincts we all have to create a sense of positivity and balance in our homes, within our communities, and for our planet.
So what ARE people doing in response to the stress, anxiety, loneliness, and Zoom Fatigue (which as it turns out, is real)? Entertainment, cooking, drinking, learning new hobbies and exercise are but a few of the ways: active responses included cooking, playing video games, reading, socializing with family, playing music, undertaking home improvement tasks, taking classes online, and writing, while people who wanted to relax and rejuvenate took advantage of watching TV, listening to podcasts, Facebooking or Instagramming, enjoying music, or seeing the news.
Active reading or playing music can help us focus and destress, since as one interviewee put it, “cooking and baking in general is a good, creative, and therapeutic way to relax and unwind after having a hard day.” Passive activities like watching TV provide complementary benefits such as lowering cortisol, educating us about well-being, living vicariously, and encouraging us to try new things.
In thinking about enhancing successful responses to the stresses and strains created by COVID hinted at in their research, SCAD students developed a set of design solutions. The Papertrails team recognized that the impact of COVID is uneven across race, ethnicity, gender, and generation. As Maha Shami of AARP noted during the SCADpro Hackathon, some of the challenges today are more of a “pressure test of things that were already happening in the world….social isolation has been exacerbated by the pandemic.” And this is especially true for seniors, who are increasingly feeling alone, while younger students want to volunteer their time and their love. Taking on people’s desire to help others and to make those meaningful personal connections, the team proposed a database of nursing homes with short profiles of different seniors who would like a pandemic penpal. The team developed prompts to get people young and old alike excited about sending snail mail; this extends the emotional connection over time (as opposed to the immediate gratification of email or IM) and has the added effect of supporting the USPS.
Another team that worked to balance active and passive approaches to managing the deleterious consequences of COVID life focused on the problem experienced by many of us during the pandemic — namely, of not being able to move outdoors and disconnect from the online virtual world due to social distancing restrictions. Interestingly, this too is part of larger social issue exacerbated by the pandemic — as Kevin Ellis of Amazon noted, “every year the things that we do physically together are gone… collaboration is a big part of what we do so we are finding [new] ways to connect and collaborate as a team… to deal with the lack of physicality.”
In response to new COVID restrictions, The Podmate team devised a portable spatial solution that enables individuals to spend time outdoors with friends while maintaining social distancing.
These 6’ x 6’ collapsible open “tents” are lightweight and transparent as well as anti-viral and can be positioned so that people can be together but remain a safe distance apart. Cameron Campbell of Amazon suggested that “pods could benefit organizations’ employees by allowing them to connect safely by giving them space to do their work.”
As social creatures, we need ways to feel connected, to belong to a community beyond our homes, to be able to share ideas and to feel our shared values and futures with our fellow citizens. Today, design based on research with users and industry professionals can play an important role in ensuring that these human needs are met.
