In this project I looked at a lot of different aspects of autism as a subject including clinical, historical, cultural and personal. A recurring issue I faced was that autism is an incredibly broad topic that is rife with misconceptions, bias and generalisations. To avoid engaging with or creating stereotypes I decided to take a more abstract approach to the visual elements of the posters so that instead of representing specific things they could evoke an area of emotion or a type of sensation. This felt like a better method of conveying how autism can feel to experience as it is often unexplained, hard to pin down and very specific to the individual’s own context.
The structure of the poster follows the DSM-5, which is one of the most well-known texts in the field of diagnosing psychological conditions. Each specific criteria has 3 unique patterns related to the experience of that symptom and 3 paragraphs detailing what that criteria means, the impact that is has on the public’s idea of autism and the reality of what that behaviour is like or can feel like to experience. The first paragraph of every poster relates to the section it is from and similarly the symbols around the edge also correspond to the section that the criteria comes under.
