What if graphic design was affected by dementia symptoms? 5

BOOK NARRATIVE AFFECTED BY MEMORY LOSS 3
A Delicate Balance is a play about a family and their friends. I chose one of the characters to have Alzheimer’s disease: Tobias, the father of the family. He progressively forgets the other characters, starting with his friends, his sister-in-law, then his daughter. By the end of the book he is only able to recognize himself, and, from time to time, his wife.

Each of the three acts in the play represents one of the three stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

In the early stage / act 1, Tobias can always recognize Agnes. Sometimes he forgets Julia (daughter) and Claire (sister-in-law) and, more often, his friends, Harry and Edna.

In the moderate stage / act 2, Tobias still knows Agnes most of the time; he recognizes Claire and Julia just a few times and Edna and Harry only once or twice. When a character speaks for a long time he also tunes out.

In severe stage / act 3, Tobias cannot follow more than 3 or 4 lines of speech. He is also unable to keep a conversation going. He is starting to have some difficulty recognizing Agnes. The other characters are not there anymore.
Experiment developed with 2nd hand book A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee, 1969, Penguin Books.

Family game

Last week I called my grandma. She didn’t know who was talking; she didn’t remember she had granddaughters. Even after I told her, she couldn’t understand how I was related to her. She usually mistakes the people of our family (we are just 7), she quite often forgets about one daughter or the other; or who is the mother of her granddaughters or who is married to who.

I thought I could make her a family tree. She could find who is who and how we are related. I was thinking to make it interactive so she could “play” with the help of the carer, as we don’t live near her.

This game is ought to stimulate the conversation and recognition of relatives by the positioning of the cards regarding kinship.

Directions for playing the game:

Every card corresponds to each relative. All people generations are represented by colours and patterns and the mixing of them. Therefore, the oldest generation just have one colour, and the younger ones are the combination of colours from the oldest ones.

The symbols represent the relations between the same generation: brothers/sisters, wife/husband.

Those should be sticked before starting to play.

Also, names of relatives and matching kinship should be written in the labels and placed in the back of the card.

Testing:

It’s the birthday of my grandmother. 90 years old.

I gave her the ‘Family Game’ experience as birthday present.

When I hand it to her, she couldn’t read what was written in the box. I was not sure if it was my writting, if it wans’t big enough, or if her vision was not well.

Once she took out the cards with the pictures, she was happy. I guess she recongized herself and she liked her picture. And she was happy to have the pictures of everyone else. I started to quickly explain her the point of the game. She just told me “Oh my dear, this seems very complicated. But I was never good in games.”

After a few days I tried again to explain the game to my grandmother. I started by asking her help to fill the labels with name and kinship. 

She had no difficulty identifying herself and my grandfather. Then she couldn’t recognize anyone.

I gave her the cards of my mother and aunt. She asked to my grandfather and he told him straight away that those were their daughters, Carminho e Zezinha. Still, my grandmother couldn’t see it.

I called my mother and aunt. I asked her who they were. At first, she couldn’t say their names, but after insisting a bit she recognized them. I gave her the cards again, but she said the ones in the cards were not the ones in front of her (the pictures are recent, maybe 1, max 2 years old). I didn’t know if it was the size of the picture or the printing quality, if it was the bad vision of my grandmother, or the patterns in the background that made her confused.

I insisted. She realised before (with her card and my grandfather’s) that I was writing the names and kinship in the back of the card. She kept moving the cards around when I insisted to see if the answer was in the back.

I finally gave up of having her confirmation and wrote the names of my mother and aunt in the labels and I asked her if she agreed. She didn’t seem very convinced. 

The same happened regarding my uncle, myself and my sister. She couldn’t recognise anyone, even if we were to make the comparison between us and the picture.

Finally, I wrote all the names and all kinship relations. I also stick the brother/sister and married symbols, but I was not very sure of that as well. It makes it even more confusing. 

Dinner was ready. I was disappointed and exhausted. My sister too. And I guess my grandmother as well.

I don’t know if just the picture and names/kinship in the back is easier for her. Without giving any “tip” regarding the relations between people. I am not sure if the graphics are more complicated rather than helping.

I asked my sister to write how she felt and to make comments on the game:

“When we were playing with Granny, it wasn’t working. I was feeling a bit desperate, irritated, since she gave me the right answer and after a little while she was already saying a wrong one. It’s a shame. Her face seemed so confused and also irritated with herself as she couldn’t remember or couldn’t keep up with what we were asking her.”

“I think the cards should have just one bigger photo of the face, maybe without the patterns, because grandma could indentify anyone. Maybe you can put the patterns just in the back.

But I like the idea. If someone played that with her everyday, maybe she could get better. Or at least, just for exercising the brain.”

Sam Winston lecture

18 Mar 2011 / Professional practice

Sam Winston describes his practice as fine art through design skills, using words, typography or books. Thus he uses design creative practices to do something else, not design.

For him, commercial work is boring. Usually, when working commercially, people arrive to a point where they don’t learn anymore, where they have to comply with the client and that means that they are just working to earn money. For Sam, this is not the main goal of working. He mentioned three main influences for his attitude to work: Alan Fletcher who defended design as authorship, where the designer has a voice; Ken Garland, the author of the manifesto “First things first” and Ron King from Circle Press. The work should have some meaning, should always teach something. Therefore his practice is based on self-initiated projects and handmade experimentation, allowing “mistakes” to take part of it. He sees that as “the poetry of my body”. He mentioned that the more he was asked to work digitally, the more he created handmade briefs for himself. Intuition also plays an important role in his work, as it’s a very interesting way of learning. Everything is part of the learning experience.

Sam is passionate about words. So he decided to make a living out of that, exploring and engaging with language at different levels. “Language isn’t solid”. He plays with the meaning of words or ways of communicating, whether is the concept of dictionary, as the container of everything you can say or write, or the internet where knowledge is superficial and based in links between words.

When at first we look to his extremely beautiful works, there is no apparent logic or reason behind it. But after observing them deeper there are always stories to read, conclusions to take, something to find. Sometimes it's also partly information design.

Finally he pointed out the importance of structure and organization when working alone and always reflect on what and why we’re working on.

“My practice is my end goal because I learn from it.”

Jonathan Rez lecture

11 Mar 2011 / Professional practice

In this lecture about wayfinding, Jonathan Rez pointed out the fact that designing wayfinding systems is more about functional solutions and constraints rather than providing experiences to who is using it. He started with some examples of mistaken, funny signs, showing how careful people designers should be, once it really affects people’s life.

In his opinion, the more correct word for describing wayfinding systems should be wayshowing.

In a wayshowing project the first step is to identify destinations and popular routes in order to find decision points where directions are needed. And then which signs are more suitable to each purpose. It’s essential to compile a destination list. This can be provided by the client or by different stakeholders. Otherwise designer can also do it, based on field/primary research.

It’s important to talk with different people in the area, both residents and visitors and ask them where they want to go, why they want to get somewhere. Like this, we can have a bigger picture and create something that is really focused on the users. Of course, not all the desired destinations will be covered. People have often very specific needs.

Following that, Rez argues that it would be actually important in some cases to reframe wayfinding as thingfinding. And that is where service design can make a difference, once it’s a user-centred approach.

Besides designing the signs it’s also important to provide an overall experience in delivering directions/information, considering pre-visit, travel, arrival, on-site, destination and egress. Making sure that the information at these different stages is coherent help to provide a good service and a good experience to the user.

"Walk the tube · Camden" will be taken forward

The project "Walk the tube · Camden" we worked on in the 1st term will become real!

We will be working together with the research centre Design Against Crime to develop it.

Ex Memoria

John Appignanesi

“Some memories fade others keep returning”

Just in 15 minutes, this film manages to cover different aspects and issues of having dementia. It starts with a scene from the past, helping us to understand some attitudes of the old lady suffering from dementia, Eva, who is not longer able to distinguish past and present. In addition, the film presents the scenario of living in a nursing home, where there aren’t references, and sharing spaces with others at this age and condition. Furthermore the fact of being far from the family makes it more difficult for Eva to recognize them and for them to understand her or know how to talk or stimulate her. It refers as well the difficulty to let other people help them with tasks they cannot longer perform, like hygiene.