Vizualizating Experience of Mental Health Models

This project develops a method for mapping mental health and psychological frameworks, such as Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and related models, in a way that holds two things at once: the structural relationships between frameworks, and the subjective experience of working inside them. Using a building with floors as the organizing metaphor, where each floor represents a different layer of inner experience or therapeutic engagement, the work aims to produce an interactive artifact that lets users compare frameworks not just as sets of concepts but as lived perspectives. Some models live primarily on one floor; others move between several. The project draws on phenomenology (particularly the Varela lineage and the “On Becoming Aware” tradition), knowledge cartography, and the long history of memory palaces and structured visualizations of ideas. The motivating conviction is that practitioners, clients, and researchers navigating multiple psychological frameworks lack tools for representing both what each model says and what it feels like to think and work through it.