GCU students design campaign to encourage male students to get help with their mental health

GCU Digital Design students have tackled an important issue by creating a university campaign for the Student Wellbeing Service.

As part of the Design For Change module, final year Digital Design students are tasked with working with a university stakeholder to design engaging campaigns. Students are placed into groups, where they are randomly assigned a team within the university to work with as a live client.

Students Jay Carnie, Gianna Johnstone, Sadia Hodgetts and Jack Macpherson were assigned the task of working with the GCU Student Wellbeing team.

“I was quite excited! At the time, I was already working on a project which surrounded a serious, important topic.” Sadia explained.

She added: “I haven’t worked on projects like this before so it was quite new to me, but I was really pleased with the allocation. It was also really good to have the chance to actually work alongside a client.”

The group were asked to focus their campaign on men’s mental health; specifically on the lack of male students using the Wellbeing Service.

Jay explained: “The Wellbeing Team asked us to tackle the issue of a lack of male students engaging with their service, so focusing it around men’s mental health. Although that’s what we were asked to focus on, the end product isn’t necessarily aimed at just male students but was still general enough that it would be aimed at all students. It ended up being more of a neutral campaign towards the student community.”

Sadie added: “For us, we wanted the design to show how to approach the initial discussion of mental health and also how to respond to someone who may be struggling, especially in a situation where the help itself is out of your control. For example, a friend who is recommending for someone to speak to someone who is qualified and trained to support them.”

The design created by the group involved a graphic which replicated an online conversation between two friends, with one friend checking up on the other and suggesting that they reach out to the Student Wellbeing Service.

This came in the form of a poster design, as well as a motion graphic which has been displayed on the University’s on-campus digital screens.

“Part of it was based on the first point of contact that someone may use in a situation where they want to admit that they are struggling. This may happen on social media where it may be easier to start these conversations. We also wanted to humanise the Wellbeing Office and to show that it’s not a scary place to go.” Jay explained.

Sadie added: “We initially looked at similar campaigns where men’s mental health is the focus, especially to see what kind of language was used and how it was approached in general. We wanted to see where we could find techniques that we could implement into our project.”

Once the designs were complete, the students were delighted to have received highly positive feedback from the Wellbeing Service. Sadie said: “It’s a feeling of relief! It’s great to see that the client actually liked and appreciated the work.”

Jay continued: “It was a strenuous process to get the designs to a place where we were happy with them, so to see that the client was really happy with how it turned out and use it around campus was a great feeling.

By Rachael McAlonan

Got a SCEBE or GSBS story? Email me at Rachael.McAlonan@gcu.ac.uk or connect with me on social media here