A couple of the winners of the RSA Design Direction caught my eye, although all the winners and entrant’s work seems amazing.Alex Ostrowski approached The Frenchay Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Bristol to see how he might use design to help in some way. It emerged that all patients suffer from post-traumatic amnesia and experience confusion in their sense of time, place and person. The term for this lost understanding is disorientation, something the unit is responsible for regaining with patients. Alex worked closely with staff to establish an appropriate colour system to bring holistic navigation to the unit, which we could apply to patients’ timetables, orientation boards, and the building itself and the project resulted in a book entitled ‘I am here’.
Jim Rokos designed ‘Mind-plan’, a tool that captured the user-centred nature of the brief, to help patients recovering from mental illness and who find it hard to plan a balanced life and fulfil their daily needs. A healthy balanced life allows recovery to continue and reduces the possibility of a relapse. Mind-plan is based on Maslow’s psychological theory, Hierarchy of Needs, which many people perceive as the definitive set of five human needs.
Tessy Britton
