Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?
Wellcome Collection
7 SEPTEMBER 2017 - 14 JANUARY 2018
Free
Graphic design is a vital element of communication and advertisement, more now than it ever has been before. 'Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?' aims to show how Graphic design has aided the medicinal world in helping to promote health, wellbeing and important information. Curated by Shamita Sharmacharja at Wellcome Collection, graphic designer Lucienne Roberts and design educator Rebecca Wright (founders of publishing house GraphicDesign&), the exhibition comprises over 200 objects, including signs, posters, digital apps and more.
The show starts with the history of advertising around smoking - how this has gone from encouraging people to smoke through glamorisation, to discouraging smoking through highlighting the dangers and damages it causes. Present were old Lucky Strike Packets, donated to soldiers in the war and sensually described in their advert as "so round, so tall, so tightly packed". A range of cigarette packets, detailing the beginnings of negative advertising - from 'Smoking Kills' signs to full on censorship and uniformity of colour, as well as gruesome and daunting photographs picturing the dangers were also included. As well as this was posters and even stamps warning against smoking's health detriments (see below).
Following, there is a section which shows how certain hospitals, mainly in Asia, have made a conscious effort to make the environment more hospitable and welcoming. In this area were inventive and original ways of signposting - including cloth signs designed by the same man behind Japanese practical store, 'Muji'. The cloth signs can be taken off and washed, for hygiene purposes, whilst also giving the hospital a more homely feel. There were other examples of introducing colour to the children's ward and having fun decor like a the big cat statue below.
Also included in the exhibition were new apps which help children and medical students identify parts of the body as well as certain treatments for different ailments. All of this modern technology enables us to really have no excuse - with all of this information so readily available for you there is no need to any longer be curious and instead to discover. It's fantastic but also quite scary at the same time...
Speaking of scary, the section surrounding AIDS and advertisment around it in the 1980s showed the somewhat insensitive and positively terrifying advert warning the public, "don't die of ignorance". Along with this advert was a small leaflet sent around to each person in the UK's home, with information around AIDS, including symptoms, risks, treatment and causes. The 80s saw a massive increase in the disease and thus it was down to graphic design as well as other features to get as much information out there to the general public to prevent it become a further epidemic.
Overall, the exhibition was insightful and interesting. It made you think about the influence of graphic design in an area where it is probably often overlooked and rarely recognised. Institutions such as hospitals will greatly benefit from what graphic design can offer them, whilst we benefit on a much larger scale from our everyday surroundings. Billboards warning against drinking and driving, adverts on cigarette packets, healthy food recommendations, all of these will involve an element of graphic design whilst also promoting the importance of health. It would seem then, after all, graphic design can indeed help towards saving lives.
OVERALL RATING: ****
https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/WZwh4ioAAJ3usf86
