Transition with Care

Overview:

Military Veterans often have a difficult time transitioning to civilian life. The ‘transition’ is abrupt, jarring and often disregards the emotional experiences veterans are facing. TAP (Transition Assistance Program) has been created to meet this gap, but has emerged as little more than a 48 hours of powerpoints that focuses on logistics rather than the lived experience.

In this project, my collaborators and I begged the questions what if we were to play with temporality and scale to shift TAP into a multi-month experience?

Process:

The team started the initial research from conducting interviews with eight veterans and two VA mental health representatives to understand the current transition experience. Based on the interviews, we summarized challenges that veterans faced at three main stages of transition:

LEAVING THE MILITARY: SUDDEN SHIFT IN IDENTITY 

As one interviewee put it, “you go from being a high ranking individual, then you hand in your gun and in seconds you’re just a civilian. Just like that.” 

GETTING HOME: DIFFICULTIES IN NAVIGATING RESOURCES

The current VA system is extremely complex and hard to navigate, which shifts the burdens to veterans.

STARTING UP: SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL ISOLATION 

Although our interviewees’ backgrounds vary, all of them experienced different levels of isolation during their readjustment to civilian life.

The second part of the research was to organize a workshop to test some of our initial design concepts with veterans, staff from Vet Centers, and designers from the Lab at OPM. The workshop consisted of three parts:

• We showed participants 6 different scenarios based on challenges veterans may face in their transition process. This part was to assess previous research pain points.

• We asked participants how veterans could be better assisted in these 6 different scenarios and how this touchpoint could potentially transform the general transition experience.

• Together, we brainstormed design ideas and concepts for six different touchpoints.

Result:

Rather than 48 hours of powerpoint we would like to re-envision it as one participant coined a ‘reverse bootcamp’. This week-long experience would not only cover the critical  logistics of finding a job, housing, etc but would, just as importantly, be an immersive and experiential shift into a post-military reality. To this end, topics like the switch from a codified hierarchical community to the civilian world would be learned rather than spoken about. As an example, we propose that all participants remove any signifiers of rank/class, wear civilian clothes and refer to everyone by first name. Additionally, participants would begin to dismantle the military mindset for a civilian one through additional activities like identity building exercises and by broaching the subject of mental health, human fragility and taking care of yourself more seriously.

Secondly, in order to extend this service beyond the week long immersive, we would follow up with a box of materials + a phone app to support veterans through their post military journeys after this experience. The box would contain various materials: reminders/artifacts of what they created in their reverse bootcamp such as core identity and personal values, materials around mental health and wellbeing, information about local community groups and resources and a warm out-reach from a VA representative. We imagine this being a joint effort engagement between the DOD and the VA rather than a traditional siloed program.