STEVIE PETET

Stevie Petet is a graphic designer and game designer in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She is currently working at the Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design as a concept and 3D artist. She likes to walk the line between artist and designer and is constantly asking what those things actually mean. She prefers to spend her time learning new softwares and thinking of new ways to implement them in her design work and elsewhere. Since she enjoys making art to cope with her own emotions, for her degree project she wanted to address how it can help others as well. 

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“FRANKLY, PEOPLE WITH TRAUMA CAN FOCUS THEIR HEALING THROUGH ART.” 

Stevie Petet was interested in the topic of trauma due to the lack of prevalence it has in discussion around mental health. She wanted to focus primarily on symptoms of Complex PTSD, which is more common in cases of interpersonal or long-term trauma. Complex PTSD is characterized by all the symptoms of PTSD but with a greater prevalence of depersonalization and poor self-concept. She thought that with the combination of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques and art therapy techniques symptoms of trauma could be alleviated. She did more research into the specifics of complex trauma and how to treat them and found that sufferers of complex trauma were less likely to recover than people with short-term trauma without some kind of treatment. 

She thought a system of aesthetics and cognitive behavioral therapy could possibly help. She created a survey that asked respondents about their symptoms, attitudes about art, and journaling habits, and found that many did not use journals but were already using art to cope with their symptoms. She wanted to unite these practices because both had benefits for dealing with trauma. She imagined a daily journal that would fold out into a tapestry. Each day the user would write to a prompt and respond to the visual elements on the page, whether that be through coloring or other activities. Each book is twenty-eight pages and comes in three different aesthetic categories in order to accommodate for the fact that not everyone has the same aesthetic values. 

For each daily activity there would be an online daily log that corresponds to the page and expands on the prompt. Online it would also track aesthetic values, and at the end of each twenty-eight day period, the user would have the option to receive a new journal that would be personalized to them with aesthetics, activities, and prompts based on the data tracked online. This system can be approached from the book to web, or from the web to a book, or just be used online. At the end of each book the user would be able to unfold the journal and reveal all the work they have done.