Erik van de Wijdeven

Department: Man and Well being

Space for Otherness

While much design caters to physical wellbeing, Erik van de Wijdeven focuses on mental wellbeing. By voluntarily spending 22 hours in an isolation cell at a psychiatric institute, he confronted himself with the fine line between sanity and a mental disorder: “Any healthy person will become psychotic after spending long enough time in one of these cells,” he says. To help others experience how quickly our sense of reality can be altered, Van de Wijdeven created a cube-shaped room with only a bare fluorescent light. The installation is designed to decrease the social stigma attached to psychiatric patients by allowing us all an insight into the complexities of the human mind.