concept walkthrough: designing for soldiers with moral injury

The end of Marine Sergeant Virginia Shaw’s third deployment to Iraq signaled the end of her eight years of service, and she was ready to head home and finally start a family with her husband.

A couple months after her return, Virginia’s feelings of regret kept her isolated from her community, making her transition back to student life at University of Michigan difficult at best.

Virginia is still afraid to get close to her loved ones because of the pain and guilt of losing three soldiers in her unit. She couldn’t find a way to communicate her struggles.

During her Marine decompression period, she was told about a website where soldiers could share their experiences and help their communities understand what the soldiers have been through during deployment.

Virginia browses the site and reads through some of the seemingly endless stories submitted by other soldiers and veterans. She identifies with many of the stories, and eventually feels safe enough to share her own experiences.

Virginia writes her story. It takes a while, but she feels better afterwards. After she uploads it, she sees that she can share it with others. She wants to send it to her husband but she doesn’t feel ready for that yet, so saves it in her account.

Virginia then sees a link to a map. The map shows circles of support, generated by the number of people who have shared and read stories in each location.

Virginia sees information about a public installation that scrolls stories from the website. She wants her husband, Ethan, to have a deeper understanding of what she went through overseas, so she emails him directions to the installation.

Ethan follows the directions and visits the public installation. While there, he reads many of the experiences shared by other veterans. He can hear their stories and begins to understand what his wife must have gone through while at war.

When he gets home, he tells Virginia about the installation. A few weeks later, Virginia feels comfortable enough to revisit her collection of messages and send her husband stories she shared.

A year later, Private First Class Alex Black has an even more difficult transition home. With the loss of his best friend during an intense small arms fight, and because of a number of questionable orders by his CO, the moral injuries he sustained weighed on him heavily.

Upon his return home, Alex was encouraged to share his story on the website so the community could get a better understanding of his experiences. He thought it was a waste of time, but did it anyway.

Alex still found it difficult to adapt to civilian life. He reluctantly visited his school advisor, who told Alex that she understood where he was coming from. Alex didn’t believe this was possible, and felt that his advisor couldn’t possibly understand what he went through.

However, Alex’s advisor told him a story she read on the website about a Sergeant Virginia Shaw. Alex realized that his advisor might actually understand him after all.

Through the sharing and reading of these stories, we envision the severity of moral injury for soldiers to lessen as time goes on, which will help soldiers return to civilian life with less difficulty, and lower the suicide rate among veterans in the United States.