Guppy
Guppy is an app that helps first year college students by providing access to mental health materials on campus and providing a peer to peer experience for those that feel more comfortable talking to others about their problems.
The Problem
Being a first year college student is stressful and being in a new environment with new people can add anxiety.
For this project I was in a team with 3 other design students.
Eddie Bukirch
Courtney DiDomenico
Adam Missbah
Isaiah Walker (ME)
the Design Process
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Interviews
Conducted interviews with students and faculty on campus.
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Empathy Building
Created empathy with all of our finding from the interview process.
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Ideate
Brainstormed and created different ideas to solve the problems on campus.
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Test
Tested our ideas with actual student feedback.
Interviews
Collectively we conducted interviews with over 60 interviews with students and faculty on campus. This was Important to us because we needed to understand how the students and faculties view of mental health resources and if they were accessible for the first-year students.
Interview Location
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Boston area in general
Northeastern University
Target Age
17-24 (college students)
Any age for professionals on campus
Interview Questions
1. Do you feel like first year students are aware of the support resources on campus?
2. What are the support resources that Wentworth offers?
3. Is there a big difference between a students first day of high school and their first day of college?
4. If a student comes to you with a mental health problem, what would you recommend to them?
5. Tell me a time when a student came to you with a problem about accessing materials (Daily meals, Books, Commuting pass), How did you handle the situation?
6. Do you feel that Wentworth does a good job at acclimating first year students?
7. Tell me a time when you did something for the first time?
We Met...
Kat, a 20 year old student from MassArt studying illustration
Christopher Scanlon, the Associate Director of The Center for Student Engagement.
JK, 22, Civil Engineering Major, WIT
We Were amazed to realize…
Kat has an insane schedule that prevents her from seeing her therapist, and her school counselors aren't much help.
Chris is currently working to add more suicide awareness resources here on campus.
JK went into the Wellness Office to find someone to talk to on a bi-weekly basis and they gave him a website to go to and said "find a psychiatrist here."
I wonder if this means…
If Kat had more time or resources to attend to herself, if she would.
If Chris had more suicide awareness around the campus would this make the students feel more comfortable on campus.
If JK would have been felt more helped if Wentworth had better resources for long-term care on campus.
