Addressing Mental Well-Being to Improve Upon the Existing stART Program

Abstract

The Strength Through Art (stART) program is a mental health prevention program offered at the National Gallery Singapore with the goal of educating youth ages 13-35 on emotional literacy through art. Our sponsor, Director Mian Tze from the stART team, tasked us in collaboration with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to enhance the existing program by addressing program reach and content retention. By gathering and analyzing both survey and interview data, we discovered findings that outlined positive and negative views regarding the topic of mental health. To address these issues, we developed and proposed modifications to the program format to tackle reach and retention. Our recommendations include different technology-based ideas from a mental wellness tracking app and gamified stART program, story books and creative care packages, and even a stART pop-up event. These recommendations were put into a design matrix leaving the stART pop-up events as the final recommendation. We hope that our final recommendation will serve the stART team and assist our partners at NUS in implementing a method that leads to a self-sustaining cycle of program reach and content retention, leading to a more accessible and impactful program