Why Design is an Opportune Field for Marriage & Family Therapists
The design field is an opportune field for marriage and family therapists (MFTs), social workers and other psychology graduates, because these professionals are trained to assess and connect with humans that struggle with issues in order to create solutions. Also, they employ a notable set of similar techniques that could inspire the field of design.
It takes many skills and traits to be a great designer — plus a dedication to the discipline and accumulated years of experience to round it off.
Design as a discipline is commonly misconceived as window-dressing or making things look pretty. Design is not interior design. Imagine a living room with a crème brocade couch and a child on it with its hands neatly crossed in the lap. Pretty? Yes. Practical? Nope. Good design can be really ugly, yet have the critical near-perfect function while solving your problem — take craigslist for instance.
In my recent research and experience, I gathered arguments for why graduates from psychology-related disciplines, and MFT in particular, may want to explore design as a potential career choice.
Here are three examples.
Reframing: When I participated in design workshops at the UCSD Design Lab, I kept thinking “I know this!” and “This is just like MFT!” (Maybe that’s like a Chinese eating Italian pasta and thinking “We invented this!” while both have the claim to fame).
Take reframing a problem, a popular design thinking method where an identified problem is approached with the question of “How might we do this differently?” According to the Reframing Studio, an issue is deconstructed and taken from a past context to a new context with the goal of creating a new product allowing for new interactions.
Similarly, in mental health therapy, reframing has been coined by Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s. He had worked with depressed patients, found that negative thoughts would intrude their minds and thus helped them to recognize the impact of these thought. Beck helped patients to shift their mindset to think more positively. This process was termed “cognitive restructuring”. Another example showing the power of “reframing” in systemic family therapy is one where childhood enuresis (bed-wetting) is understood as “crying with the bladder”. Now, the patient’s parents can look at the child’s behavior differently, and muster up more empathy for the troubled kid and its emotions.
I see now how reframing is a human cognitive ability that is applied in different disciplines — each having a tendency for claiming its copyright.
Actually no discipline owns a cognitive method. And each discipline is encouraged to know where else its techniques are used.
Empathy: Clearly a buzzword, empathy has been recognized in the design field for approximately 15 years. When I met designers in US cities like Pittsburgh and San Diego as well as in Bremen, Germany, — and after voraciously reading about design thinking after my initial infection with it — I kept stumbling over empathy as concept.
This blog post by IDEO designer Tim Brown beautifully communicates how empathy with another person’s situation would dramatically alter a designer’s motivation and drive for solutions. Then again a recent article in the New York Times critically looks at empathy if it is merely used to improve products or as a strategy to avoid responsibility.
In mental health treatment, empathy is considered essential to therapy because for any therapeutic tactic to work the person in treatment needs to feel understood. Also, common factors such as empathy, warmth, and the therapeutic relationship have been shown to correlate more highly with client outcome than specialized treatment interventions.
Great design requires designers “getting” the clients. The same is true for great therapy.
While empathy might be a nice-to-have as a designer or an add-on skill, it is a crucial prerequisite in becoming a therapist. Developing empathy for oneself and others is a hard earned token as a result of the 500-hr practicum, the time when text b00k smart MFT students are thrown into real interpersonal encounters and have to translate concepts into healing experiences. Alas, there are supervisors and safe peer groups that virtually hold your hands whenever you process.
The field: Design researchers have made a valid point about the necessity of ethnography, i.e. observing people in their natural setting. For user-centered projects, instead of conducting focus group research in an unusual office setting, design researchers may opt to venture out to observe real scenarios which can help with a particularly complicated or critical design challenge. Ethnographic methods allow a deep understanding of design problems.
Similarly, in mental health treatment especially in the 1970s, social workers and so-called mobile therapist started visiting patients and their families in their homes. It’s one thing to treat a teenager diagnosed with schizophrenia in a private office and another to see her interact at home with her primary caregiver and act as she would between sessions. This was my other “I know this!” moment when designers hailed the importance of observing in the field.
Let’s be crystal here— I believe that great design work includes feeling through the service or product experience and with the user or, rather, the human during several stages of the design process. This became evident in the video about the Cleveland Clinic and the experience of its patients.
Yet, I’ve encountered magnificent designers with impressive accomplishments reluctant to explore the plight of the other that I believe is required for better work. Is it possible to only think your way through to a solution? Isn’t it necessary to get in contact with the microculture, the probe, the touchy feeling? And once you arrived at that place, to also linger there? Doesn’t the best work benefit from holding the feeling, and outlasting it, void from problem-solving, intellectualizing or even talking (not even in your head)?
I have seen designers grab post-its right away, jump to white boards at an instance, and crack jokes to endure the awkwardness of human connection, when they reached the stage of feeling or where empathy was an option. I was surprised, and also disappointed.
I think of Freud’s term sublimation here — when you transform a societally unaccepted impulse into an acceptable solution. A cliché example is the one of a professor wanting to sexually devour a student and instead, he finishes a scientific paper on a Saturday night. (Not all scientists writing papers on Saturday night want to devour their students.) What perfect conversion of libido into societally appreciated work! Now if a designer gets to the mushy phase of design — empathizing for instance, with the single, and overwhelmed parent that wants to date — it might be hard for the designer to put herself into the parent’s low-income, struggling shoes. Yet, alas, there are post-its, and techniques for the rescue (I am being ironic, clearly not a good choice. Because I also understand the designer that is resistant to feel the fate of the user).
Great designers don’t fear the experience of the client — they empathize!
As a professional crossing from one discipline into another, I propose collaboration between the disciplines as one solution. I would hope for more MFTs to explore design thinking and doing, and the design field as a playground. I’ve seen impressive skills sets, traits as well as dedication amongst MFTs that are relevant for design work. Marcin Treder summarized for user experience design what it takes to be a great (UX) designer. Now overlap these eight characteristics with what defines a great systemically minded therapist.
