3D Printing as Art Therapy

He was a joyful guy in a ball cap sitting next to me on a bus ride to an unknown destination. We were on the annual surprise outing at the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) meeting in Orlando, and we struck up a conversation about my hometown of Cleveland. Turns out he’s also a Browns fan, so we were instant friends.

I had no idea I was seated next to a conference speaker who would become the talk of AMUG. But when John Sorvillo took the stage the next day to express his thanks for winning the Randy Stevens Scholarship to attend, he struck a powerful emotional chord with people listening. He shared his passion for his work as a director of Westwood Preparatory Academy, a system of schools in residential treatment centers for juvenile offenders in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It’s a place for young people who either aren’t safe for their home environment, or unsafe in it.

“We try not to read too much of their files because we want to know the students, not their offenses. They’re there for heavy duty treatment. They’re still young. There’s still a chance to get them on a good path,” Sorvillo said. “[On stage] I kind of detailed my journey and how my passion for working with these kids comes from the fact that I am one of these kids. I’m a survivor of sexual abuse.”

It was the first time he’d publicly shared the roots of his commitment to the kids who attend his schools.

“I know their trauma, I know their pain, I know what they’re going through,” he said. “When I got up on stage, it was probably the hardest thing I’ve done. The support I’ve received has been absolutely life-changing. I want to pay that forward.”

He received a standing ovation and dozens of outstretched hands from people wanting to find a way to support his work, a novel approach that blends art therapy with additive manufacturing. Sorvillo used a grant to purchase 3D printing equipment, initially thinking it would offer students strong vocational skills that would serve them well in the job market. But in one particular additive manufacturing session, he realized he could use the 3D printers to help students better manage their emotions.

“I had them design a really big cube. [I told them] ‘This is our frustration. This is our anger. We’re going to shrink the cube as we count down,’” he said. “This was their feelings, their emotion given physical form. I told them think about that: ‘You took your really big feeling down to a small manageable feeling. When your feelings start to get big, remember that cube. The cube has sharp angles, it’ll poke you every now and then just like your feelings will. But you know you can handle that.’”

It’s a new-tech take on art therapy and art psychotherapy, which are both elements of the support Westwood Prep offers its students, said Josh Kale, director of the Art Therapy program for New Beginnings Residential Treatment Center, located in the same building as Westwood Prep.

“In art therapy, everything means something,” Kale said. “There will be a specific activity or drawing where we get more information about where [the student is] in their environment, how an individual perceives himself. It helps the child to open up more. There’s always specific directives and objectives. We’re not just coloring pretty pictures. There’s a reason behind what we do. It helps with self-regulation, decreasing anxiety, anger management, depression.”

The students learn how to separate themselves from their strong emotions and better manage their reactions, he said.

“It’s a cathartic process,” Kale said. “Having that visual form of what that anger looks like, then it’s not so scary trapped within the mind. Now it’s separate from the body. That opens a whole discussion about anger, triggers to anger, what does my body look like, where do I feel anger in my body. So we can hopefully do things ahead of time to notice [the strong emotions], recognize triggers, what are we going to do when the anger starts to become intense.”

It’s common to use clay or painting as the medium for expression, Kale said. But the same principles apply to objects created on a 3D printer. So Sorvillo plans to encourage his students to craft their own 3D “anger monster”—a physical representation of the jumble of emotions that so often fuel inappropriate or unsafe behavior. He described its effectiveness in terms of what he calls the “Voldemort principle”: when you’re afraid of something and refuse to name it, it has power over you.

“I thought, wouldn’t that be cool to take that into 3D design and have them design their monster,” he said. “When you give it a shape and a name, you start to take power over it. That’s the first step in recovery. We’ll have the kids design their feelings. If you’re depressed, maybe it’s low and blobby. If you’re angry, maybe it has sharp angles. You’re taking that first step of ownership of your feelings. Now you have something physical and tangible. You learn that you can walk away from it and go function as a human being for a while, then you can come back to it when you’re ready to deal with it.”

He also came up with a way to make it a little more fun.

“We occasionally play Dungeons and Dragons. I thought, how can we tie this all together?” he wondered. “We’re taking the kids’ monsters and shrinking them down to table top gaming size, and the therapist is leading them through campaigns [in the game]. They team up with their friends and kick their monster’s ass. The kids are starting to buy into that.”

Sorvillo continues to look for ways to engage both his students and new friends in the 3D printing industry.

“I’m making this up as we go along. I’ve been empowered by all the great people I met at AMUG to just start reaching for things. With the support I received from these folks, now I know that I’m the guy who can make things happen. If we can get these kids invested in it, it can help us long term.”

It can help all of us, not just young people like the students at Westwood Prep. If you’d like to learn more about Sorvillo’s programs or how you might be able to help, I encourage you to reach out to him. As professionals, we can do so much more than make a better medical device, process, or system. We can change lives when we focus our talents and drive toward strengthening our communities. 

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Dawn Lissy is a biomedical engineer, entrepreneur, and innovator. Since 1998, the Empirical family of companies (Empirical Testing Corp., Empirical Consulting LLC, and Empirical Machine LLC) has operated under Lissy’s direction. Empirical offers the full range of regulatory and quality systems consulting, testing, small batch and prototype manufacturing, and validations services to bring a medical device to market. Empirical is very active within standards development organization ASTM International and has one of the widest scopes of test methods of any accredited independent lab in the United States. Because Lissy was a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, she has first-hand, in-depth knowledge of the regulatory landscape. Lissy holds an inventor patent for the Stackable Cage System for corpectomy and vertebrectomy. Her M.S. in biomedical engineering is from The University of Akron, Ohio.