The Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Project
Built from a 2021 ISTD 'Putting Things In Order' brief, the OCD project visually explores the thoughts and experiences of people who have OCD, and how putting things in order can help ease their intrusive thoughts.
ISTD Brief Overview
‘Putting Things in Order’ project asks to reimagine the concept of classifying, sorting and ordering. From a young age, we are taught how to classify objects, words, emotions and concepts, and ordering constantly surrounds us, and can be physical or theoretical, concepts such as placing objects in groups of their similarities to compare their differences, like by their shapes, or by the emotions, we attribute to those objects. Ordering surrounds us, through school we were classified based on our intelligence to help give us the right level of support, grouped by what interests we have, what clothes we wear. Sorting can have a much more personal connection to a person, object cannot just have physical similarities, but also emotional similarities, objects we associate with a specific emotion, or people.
This brief asks to find a lesser-known way of ordering things and presenting them within whatever format the designer believes complements their ideas the best. It has been asked that we look at a range of possibilities and directions that the project could be taken in, supporting our ideas with contextual research. The brief asks to use some ‘fresh interpretation’, to find an interesting and inventive way. The brief was set by the ISTD, an institution focused on graphic design and developing typographical pieces of design work.
Strategy
This project aims to present the thought process of someone who has OCD, specifically focusing on Symmetry and Orderliness OCD, how some people find comfort in placing objects in a specific order and how when this order isn’t correct, how this can be distressing and can cause panic attacks and anxiety. I want this publication is to be a safe place for people who have OCD to be able to find comfort in being able to experiment with the piece and experimenting with an order, as well as a way of visually seeing that they aren’t alone in this journey. To go along with this, I want this publication to be a place for people who don’t have OCD to be able to understand in a visual way and by physically ordering the objects that some people with OCD could be experiencing. Looking at other OCD publications, most of them focus on presenting statics and presenting stories from people who have OCD and what makes this project different is that it is interactive and focuses more on how putting things in order can help calm someone and visually presents how the intrusive thoughts could be represented through typography. To go along with this, I wanted to use this as a platform to raise awareness for OCD and provide people with further reading and resources to help support people with OCD and help people who want to learn about OCD have access to reliable resources.
To make this possible, I will have to do extensive research surrounding OCD, as well as find reliable sources and other design publications, to be able to ensure my publication presents accurate information in the most respectful way possible.