Where The Portraits Can Be Practically Useful
Education
- The portraits can give teachers more feedback so that they can understand their pupils in a wider perspective, while also enabling pupils to understand their teachers better. They can also:
- Enable young people to broaden and clarify their vocational options.
- Show how studying has affected different individuals, and what varied outcomes can follow from studying different subjects.
- Allow students from different origins and communities to learn a little more about the realities of each other's lives.
Community Life and Local Government
- Give every individual the chance to be heard and the feeling that they are being listened to.
- Enable people to discover with whom they might collaborate to achieve common goals.
- Help citizens understand the attitudes and problems of those who manage local facilities, and vice versa.
Work
- Provide a more complete picture of an individual's talents, potential and character than a curriculum vitae.
- Enable job seekers to discover the realities of different occupations.
- Help people who have mastered skills in danger of being lost to record the lessons of their experience.
- Make it easier for service providers and customers to understand each other's needs.
- Facilitate communication between different specialities.
People with Disabilities
- Dispel misconceptions about different disabilities and improve appreciation of the varied needs and attitudes of people with disabilities.
- Assist people with disabilities to obtain work in areas from which they are often thoughtlessly excluded.
- Reveal 'the disabled' not as a category but as part of a humanity where everybody has a different mixture of qualities and limitations.
Family and Personal Life
- Help men and women to avoid thinking in stereotypes and to understand each other better.
- Improve family conversations, broadening the range of topics discussed and encouraging the different generations to exchange memories and thoughts.
- Provide an alternative to introspection as a means of understanding oneself.
Art and Literature
- Encourage collaboration between literary and visual forms of art.
- Give artists and writers access to a wider range of experience.
- Help stimulate a renewal of portraiture and of heraldry.
Health
- Demonstrate how portraiture and conversation can be used as a form of preventative medicine and as a way of reducing health costs.
- Provide information and validation for our medically-supervised research project, in process of development, on how depression and stress might be diminished by conversational interaction, at a time when depression is expected to become the second largest cause of disability, and increasing pressures at work are turning stress into an epidemic.