Giorgia Aloi-Blog

MA-Applied Imagination

Welcome to my blog! Here I will be uploading everything that matters to me and that could be useful for my work

A very fruitful art therapy session with the Tomato group on Thursday. We decided to undertake this class to understand more about this field and out ourselves in the shoes who those who undertake art therapy on a daily basis. Nicola, the therapist, was incredibly helpful in making us understand what it takes and what the process is depending on age groups. Art therapy, compared to normal therapy, includes drawings and/or clay which makes it a third member making it a triangular relationship. This therapy is especially used when kids experience detachment issues as it is easier for them to create rather than articulate with words.Moreover, I found it very interesting when she thought that AI can be useful to art therapy as it can support at-home well being and sometimes people feel more comfortable when putting their emotions through an iPad as we do not speak and we do not get judged. 1/03/2024

How virtual reality is being used to treat mental health issues-Hannah Kuchler 2018 (Financial Times)

The article explores how Limbix, a start up company, addresses anxiety, addiction, depression, pain and trauma tracking the interest of many experts from Harvard and Stanford. Experts working with Limbix are discovering and developing VR scenes that can be used to understand how effective the technology is for the treatment of mental health issues. Patrick Bordnick, has been looking in particular at treating addiction; VR has already shown to work as it can induce cravings and help the therapist focus the triggers. ‘One day, people who are prescribed opiates could be given an educational VR tour of what their body will look after years of addiction’ and this is why many companies are pressured by this development, as it can improve the users’ wellbeing. 5/03/2024

Art therapy-Advantages and Disadvantages

To help myself understand deeply what art therapy means I decided to create a mind map that shows the advantages and disadvantages. As the map demonstrates, art therapy aims to help with depression, anxiety, ptsd and trauma. It is a flexible medium where clay, pencils and paint are used to work on an idea chosen by the therapist at the start of the session. Therefore the benefits of art therapy are; stress relief, ability to share feeling without words and find inner growth and strength. However it also illustrates disadvantages like the lack of evidence, recovery delay and also the fact that group therapy may not be suitable for all. 6/03/2024

Today we visited the UCL Computer Science department and we met Mark Quinlan, an AI specialist. We first introduced our project which he thought was very interesting and up to date with what is going on nowadays. An important point that he made was that AI is moving very fast, faster than we all thought, and explained us that our project could become real in as little as 10 years. Apart from the good news and insights he also gave us crucial points to add and avoid to perfect our research. 9/03/2024

This is the last week of our Future of work scenario. On Tuesday we focused on what to talk about during our presentation. I found this meeting very important as we understood how much we worked towards this and how much information we had such as all the art therapists and the AI experts we talked to and also our personal research with articles and books. Doing this meeting we encountered some challenges as some of us wanted to change and avoid some points in the presentation whilst some other members thought these to be crucial. 12/03/2024

This is our final result, the presentation on our speculation on the intersection of Art therapy and AI. My group and I tried our best to put all the information gathered in only a 10 minutes presentation and we are all very happy of the final outcome. My have been great at collaborating especially as we did not have a main leader but we all had an equal say. I am glad that we communicated effectively since the beginning and we had the same ideas since the start. However we did encounter some challenges at times like miscommunication and also the reality of contacting stakeholders which in the first week had been hard. Overall I really enjoyed working on something I am truly interested in, AI and Mental health. 13/03/2024

This week I have finally presented my EPP project on Augmented Reality and sin conditions. I felt comfortable when presenting as I do believe that this concept can be used is the near future thanks to AI. After the presentation I received important feedback from the tutors like How can I go further in my research?, What is the relationship between me and my project?, Why is it important to me?, Why am I addressing this issue?How can I use this project for my future?. Related to this is also the fact of intervention which madame understand why we are doing something and why we are creating it. 16/04/2024

This Tuesday’s lecture has been extremely helpful I finally know that my question needs to be measurable, feasible, original and complex. It has been, and still is, hard for me to wrap my head around what a Great RQ should be like and this graph was crucial when it had been showed in class as everyone had questions and which made me feel comforted. However, an exercise that really helped me was the Theory of Change that asked important questions to create the perfect research questions and it allowed me to talk to people at my table to get feedback.

This afternoon Tim provided the class with a very interesting lecture on how to find more information for our project. He provided pivotal insights on picking out crucial concepts in the question; words that are measurable and focused. I have learnt that there are many databases available, apart from UAL library, that can provide me with resources. However, it is not easy to look for something specific that one is trying to research and this is why changing words, using synonyms, is very important to find related articles/books. At the end of the session Tim provided the whole class with book that were not necessarily related to our topic; this forced me to look at wider concepts that can be implemented in my research. 30/04/2024

I have always struggled to create mind maps and I thought I was not going to find anything new or understand how to approach this. During the lecture we were provided with points that we could follow that really helped me and I am glad I gave mind maps another go. As I am planning to focus on social media and counterfeit products and how they affect women I started off with ‘why am I doing this, why is it a problem?’, I then moved to finding who this issues affects (women) and how social media still has not been able to tackle the selling of these dangerous products. So what is my plan? Look for who is affected and involve my personal experience, legislation policies, the digital age and how it all started. What is the change I want to see? Who will this help? 1/05/2024

This article has been one of the most helpful for my project. Talking about how Tim Tok profits from the sale of illegal products that are mostly harmful. This article goes back to 2023 when Tik Tok promised to solve the issue of the sale of these counterfeit products. However it still has not been solved which is why I am focusing on this matter. 7/05/2024

Today was the Pop up Showcase day, I started off by educating my classmates and tutors with my project and how counterfeit products are everywhere in the UK and mainly affect social media users between 16 and 33 years old (70% of buyers). I found very interesting how the class found it shocking that that many people are influenced by counterfeit cosmetics and how huge social media is and how much it holds.13/05/2024

I then decided to do some testing. I showed the same moisturiser called CeraVe both however have different prices. The one on the right is the price from the Tin Tok shop (£2.20) and the one on the left (£17.00) is from Boots. The results were impressive as 3 people chose to try the product from the Tim Tok shop as it was cheaper and 3 people chose the product from Boots as they think it’s safer. This testing really aided me as I am now sure that many people out there are highly influenced by the price. 13/05/2024