Alex Ostrowski is Here
Author of this post: Kate Andrews | About Blog Authors »By Kate Andrews
Over the past week, I had the pleasure of meeting the multi-talented Graphic Designer Alex Ostrowski. Alex, a 2008 UK Graphic Design graduate from Bristol’s University of West England, recently won the RSA Design Directions and NESTA’s competition ‘Engage!’.
Tagged to “catalyse social change through design-led citizen participation”, the Engage! project, aimed to encourage social responsibility in young designers. The 2008 RSA Design Directions brief asked student designers to consider how they could best use design to bring about positive change within a community and instigate a project solution of this nature.
In response to the brief, Alex took his skills as a designer to The Frenchay Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre in Bristol. Through immersive time spent within the Rehabilitiation Centre, Alex soon discovered that many 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, and the rehab unit is responsible for helping patients regain their orientation skills. Through speaking with staff, Alex established that the process of re-orientation contained some inefficient aspects that needed addressing. Working closely with staff to create holistic navigation of the unit that would help support a clear sense of place and self, he established an appropriate color system and design that was applied to patients’ timetables, orientation boards, and the building itself. The project proved very useful for the unit, which has continued with an improved re-orientation strategy.
Winner of the Engage! project, Alex received the RSA Design Directions Award for his supporting book ‘I Am Here’ . To find out his motivations for the project, you can watch an interview with Alex here.
