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.