The growing challenges presented by the current mental health crisis provide opportunities for alternative interventions to support social healthcare practices. One such example is engagement with objects, which has been found to be beneficial in a variety of these contexts. These “object-based practices” elicit sensory experience and provide a stimulus for communication, both of which can effectively support mental health and wellbeing.

Despite the multisensory potential of materiality and the impact of this on affective response, few examples exist of object-based practices which incorporate deliberately crafted objects. This project therefore combined craft and object-based practices to create a series of multisensory handmade and digitally enhanced objects. These were used as “enticatypes” to open up conversation with the research participants about further development of object-based practices for mental health and wellbeing.

Findings showed that handcrafted objects could be more successful in these contexts than those traditionally used in object-based practices. Value was also found in the creation of diverse object-based “communities of practice”, and the possibilities for handcrafted objects to facilitate difficult conversations in other areas of social research.