Fresh Air World
A collaboration between illustrators, animators, historians, health professionals and scientists to showcase an illustrated journey of a patient’s experience with severe asthma.
Wider context
This project incites and visualises the memories of patients who have suffered severe asthma, and the major benefits of new therapies in their treatment. In a process of capturing and returning their stories, we used oral history and visualisation techniques to trial an innovative history-health-illustration method that incited patient storytelling and built graphic comic stories and images. This project showcases the benefits of arts-science collaboration for patients and is funded by the Arts and Health Collaboration Fund.
About the design
To capture the participant’s experience with severe asthma I wanted to keep the narrative simple and distilled the interview into three key scenes. I have the participant struggling as a child, as an adult at the height of impact, and his life now free from severe symptoms.
I used the colours of purple and yellow which the participant used to describe how his life felt; purple the isolation of symptoms, yellow present happiness and freedom. I threaded this through the scenes to symbolise the severity of the asthma and their journey of recovery.
Alongside colour I used ink to layer symbolism. Letting the ink bleed across the page mimics air particles and connects the scenes together. I also manipulated the ink to add further symbolism, mimicking the individual scenes. For example, the small gaps of ink in the middle scene echoes the text which reads ‘gasping out of small gaps in a window’. The reduced ink in the final scene provides a sense of relief after the dense textures from the previous frame, visualising the participant’s newfound relief of symptoms and ease of breath.
These three panels were then incorporated into a 6-page roll-fold booklet.
Overlaid are quotes directly from the interview to ground the images and strengthen the narrative. I wanted to create an illustrative outcome that was personal to the participants experience but would also enable any severe asthma sufferer to see a part of themselves. I think the simplicity of the three frames helps strike this balance between individual and broad experiences.
““It was a great experience- well conducted by the students and it revitalised my memories of my asthma journey and made me appreciate more the benefits I have derived from (my biologic treatment) and how lucky I am.””
With special thanks to the University of Plymouth, and the Arts-Health Collaboration Fund that made this project possible. You can read further about the project here.
