Eric Michael Molumby
The project is a systemic design exploration that reimagines how society understands and responds to ADHD and mental health challenges. The project critiques the biomedical paradigm’s focus on diagnostic categories and symptom management, arguing that such framings often reduce people to labels while obscuring the systemic conditions that shape their experiences of distress. Instead, Beyond Labels employs Systems Oriented Design (SOD) to visualise complexity, map feedback loops across education, healthcare, family life, and policy, and to prototype alternative, trauma-informed practices.
The project emerged from both personal lived experience and extensive fieldwork, including interviews with youth, caregivers, practitioners, and policymakers. It combines gigamapping, speculative artefacts, and participatory workshops to surface systemic blind spots and create shared spaces for dialogue. Central design interventions include a series of interconnected systemic maps and a comic fiction probe — a narrative artefact that lowers barriers for participation and invites critical reflection. These tools function as catalysts for conversation, enabling diverse stakeholders to co-explore new imaginaries of care beyond diagnosis.
Beyond Labels contributes to systemic design by showing how speculative mapping can both analyse existing structures and provoke collective imagination. It demonstrates that design artefacts can move fluidly between research, analysis, and provocation — serving as both epistemic tools and boundary objects. The project’s outcomes suggest that mental healthcare systems need not be reduced to biomedical treatment pathways but can be reframed as relational ecosystems that prioritise empathy, resilience, and systemic awareness.
Ultimately, Beyond Labels positions systemic design as a mediator between lived experience, professional knowledge, and policy frameworks. By shifting the focus from “what is wrong with you” to “what has happened to you, and how do systems respond?”, the project aims to reduce stigma, foster agency, and expand the cultural conversation on mental health. Its methods and findings are transferable to broader contexts where complexity, trauma, and systemic blind spots hinder inclusive, sustainable solutions.
KEYWORDS: systemic design, holistic diagnosis, ADHD, mental health, gigamapping, speculative design, trauma-informed care, participatory design.
