Every little thing that surrounds us is employing the persuasive or provoking power of graphic design, influencing our lives. This is what this exhibition wants to prove us. After three years of research "Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?" exhibition is now ready to open our eyes and let us see the connection between life and design in persuading, informing and protecting people through six distinct sections: Persuasion, Education, Hospitalisation, Medication, Contagion and Provocation.

c532ea8cdd3a1cf0652626e2547cf847
Speculative cigarette packaging by DJ Stout (2009)

The journey starts with the Persuasion section, where the pieces displayed show people the controversial relation that graphic design has always had with smoking and the tobacco industry. From being the cause of the tobacco industry's growth it became a massive weapon against it, thanks to designers who always had a massive impact on this industry as we can understand by DJ Stout's statement for the St Petersburg Times: "Our marketing advice to cigarette companies in the new, heavily regulated era is to fully accept the anti-smoking restrictions and wallow in the government's apocalyptic health warnings. Don't make excuses or dance around the stepped-up marketing regulations, just transform the whole cigarette pack into a three-dimensional warning label." (DJ Stout, 2009).

design-for-patient-safety-nhs-guideline-19-638
Information Design for Patient Safety: A Guide to the Graphic Design of Medication Packaging reportby The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design's National Patient Safety Agency (2007)

Moving forward the subject change from persuading to helping. In the Education, Hospitalisation and Medications sections  we can find proofs of the help that graphic deign is constantly giving in these three fields. It is a bridge between medical profession and public, made by students, patients and visitors, and passing through it means understand more about the human body, what it needs and how we should take care of it by buying the right medicine or following the perfect treatment. So these proofs help us understanding what The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design's co-founder Jeremy Myerson said: "Healthcare was initially slow to recognise the life-preserving benefits of good graphic design: typography, print and illustration were regarded as decorative add-ons in the scientific, evidence-based world of the clinician. But times change and medicine is catching up fast. 'Follow the instructions on the label' might sound easy enough, but it all depends on how those instructions are designed." (J., Myerson, 2017, page 161).

"Whether employed to warn or impart information about symptoms, prevention and infection, graphic design is part of the front-line response to infectious disease, helping to make life-saving messages accessible to all." (S. Schrauwen, L. Roberts, R. Wright, 2017, page 167); this is what visitors are going to understand finally in the last two sections: Contagion and Provocation. Both show us the impact that graphic design has on the increase of awareness about diseases and activism in matters of healthcare, sometimes provoking people and sometimes just using striking typography and imagery.

SilenceDeath_01-624x963
Silence=Death posterby Gran Fury (1987)

As it is trying to explain, this exhibition employees the power of minimal, precise and clean graphic design, succeeding in its aim to make us more conscious about the fact that graphic design can actually save our lives. Well made and full of interesting informations it guides visitors in this vortex  of posters, packagings, books and a lot of other examples of how graphic design is constantly contributing to make it easier to live on our world.

531 words

Bibliography
DJ Stout. (2009). To be published in St. Petersburg Times [Preprint]. Available at: https://dinca.org/pentagram-cig-packaging-obama-signs-cig-legislation/1266.htm (Accessed: 6 November 2017).
S. Schrauwen, L. Roberts, R. Wright. (2017) Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? London: Graphic Design&.