The growing crisis of college students’ mental health and well-being is continuously receiving worldwide attention from the higher education community. Framing and making sense of “problems” in a present situation can lead to creating an improved future reality. Between 2019 and 2021, we collaborated with undergraduate students of The Ohio State University and enabled them to make creative contributions to the discovery of the everyday stresses that they face. Multiple co-design workshops, both in-person and virtual, and surveys were conducted for this study. As one of the outcomes of the study, we collected major stress sources from 100 OSU undergraduate students of different levels (freshmen to seniors) and different majors (Biology, Business, Design, Economics, Engineering, English, Neuroscience, etc.).

We coded the students' self-reported stressors into different categories. Mutter of Voices is a digital web poster that displays these stress categories and the stress data we gathered from the study. The design language of typography is used to express the data. The selections of the typefaces and the type sizes are determined by the occurrence frequency of the stress categories. The larger the size of the text, the more people express stress concerns in that particular category. Typefaces with similar x-heights are selected to avoid perception bias. The mouse cursor turns into a red-colored filter to reveal the intimate messages from the students – what they said about their stress. Each reported stressor from the student is marked with a face emoji.

Data collection and analysis team: Yvette Shen, Anne Knellinger, Deanna Sagaris, Liz Sanders

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