The Thinking Trap Fangting Gu
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Essay Storyboard Animation Exhibition Gallery talk Thanks
My thesis is a visual story of the “thinking trap�. I am interested in exploring how design might improve or express the feeling of cognitive disorder and help people rebuild healthy-thinking habits. INTRODUCTION
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ESSAY
Thinking traps are patterns of thought that tend to trigger feelings of negativity and trap us in anxiety. This project creates messages designed to help people recognize their negative thoughts and build healthy-thinking habits. ESSAY
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Re-Designing The Thinking Trap
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BACKGROUND My experience with anxiety
and depression was locked in my heart never to be touched, I thought I had moved on, but I realized that I was still holding on to a good deal of guilt and shame when talking about it. Someone told me that the secret would lose power if you open up to the world. So this is my story. When I started grad school at MICA, I was troubled by anxiety and depression and I could not stop doubting and blaming myself that I was not good enough and I may not be able to get it done. But there was another voice in my mind telling me I could overcome it. So I became a student of the mind. I researched many books about mental health and cognitive disorders. I practiced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which helped me understand the thinking traps that I fell into, allowing me to analyze my negative thoughts. I wrote down situations that triggered my anxiety and depression in my diary and tried to replace my negative thoughts with positive ones. After a few weeks, I was able to understand my mind better, and the thinking traps I created myself. Although I am not a pessimist, I unconsciously transferred the stress and pressure of every day into negative emotions. My negative thoughts affected my feelings and behavior, which let my anxiety and depression worsen. I realized all of those problems are related to the cognitive distortions in my brain. When I challenged my negative thoughts
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by changing my perspective, however, my anxiety disappeared. My personal experience of anxiety is the heart of my thesis. When talking with my colleagues and friends, I knew that I was not the only one who is facing mental health issues. On average, 1 in 4 people is struggling with mental illness (World Health Organization). Under the massive pressure of academic study, students and young adults exhibit different levels of anxiety and depression. As a designer, I always wanted to make a positive impact on people’s lives through design. Having lived with anxiety for long and having known so many others who have dealt with similar issues, I wanted to encourage dialogue about mental health in a creative and meaningful way that people would be able to relate to themselves.
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“Designers today produce more than logos and cereal boxes; they create situations that stimulate the mind and body over time.� ELLEN LUPTON
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THE POWER OF DESIGN In her new book:
Design is Storytelling, Ellen Lupton writes: “Designers today produce more than logos and cereal boxes; they create situations that stimulate the mind and body over time.� Indeed, nowadays graphic design involves multiple disciplines, rather than just being about selling products. In 2017, Graphic Design &, a U.K publishing house, published a book called Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? In this book, the editor collected many fantastic projects related to health, aiming to figure out the positive impacts and supports on wellbeing that graphic design brings to our lives. On the AIGA Eyes on Design website, there is an exclusive column about design and mental health: including publication design, posters, and illustrations about anxiety, depression and other mental illness. There are more and more designers offering their creative solutions to people with mental illness than ever before. They have much to contribute to the area of mental health, where imagination and ingenuity can transform communication, diagnosis, awareness, and support. Good design can make your life easier and even change your lives. Graphic designers have unique powers; they use words and images, signs and symbols, color, scale and format to convert messages. In his book Infographics: Human Body, Peter Grundy combines humor and illustrations to tell stories through design to young people
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LEFT The cover of Can Graphic
Design Save Your Life? A published by Graphic Design &. RIGHT An exhibition explores the
relationship between graphic design and health at Wellcome Collect Gallery in London.
ESSAY
of how the human body works. His design conveys complex messages simply and makes things easy to understand, and it generally communicates via pictures and therefore speaks to a broad audience (from pre-literate children to adults). Designers such as Peter Grundy apply their imagination when trying to explain science, aligning it with the knowledge to at least help people survive. And the Graphic design is one of the best ways to achieve these goals.
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Graphic design can be a mentor and a listener. Launched in 2016, MullenLowe London created a campaign “We listen” for Samaritans, a group that helps people suffering from depression, and suicidal thoughts. The campaign focused on the Samaritans as “expert listeners” and included a series of unique and anonymous portraits of people facing away from the camera. In the messages, they claim to be okay, but actually, they don’t. The campaign provides
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a call to action for people to get help from the organization. This is an incredible example about the power of graphic design helps people open up and communicate true feelings through images, words, typography, and colors since it’s hard for them to talk about their problems and emotions because of stigma and portrayal of mental illness in the society. Since launching, this campaign has been awarded a highly prestigious D&AD Pencil for its exceptional idea. Not only is Graphic design about listening, but it is also about storytelling and problemsolving. As two New-York based designers, Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman showed in 2016 with “Let’s talk about mental health,” a campaign that encouraged people to share their stories and experiences with mental issues. They presented these stories using images and illustrations on their websites and social media, which were reposted more than ten thousand times and helped create an open dialogue on the mental health issue. This is a great example illustrating how to use graphic design to shape messages and ideas and contribute to the experience and solve problems. While Walsh and Goodman used words and illustrations to communicate their inspired message, for my thesis project, I am using sounds, animation, multiple materials, colors and my imagination to communicate performances and the emotions of falling
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into the thinking trap and ways to get out of that trap. PROCESS During the research, I found that
accessing and using mental health services is unaffordable and very difficult. Student consulting schedules were always full, and you have to wait at least two or three weeks. It made me feel shame when facing a GP to speak about my feeling emotionally and that I am not alone in this. I believe it is important to be able to explore your concerns and try to make sense of them before you feel ready to open up to others. And I want to make this process fun and more playful, and I didn’t want it to feel too clinical. Therefore, my thesis is a visual story of the “thinking trap” — patterns of thought that tend to trigger feelings of negativity and trap us in anxiety. I am interested in exploring how design might improve or express the feeling of cognitive disorder and help people rebuild healthy-thinking habits. I want to create motion graphics because motion tells stories, and motion communicates better than still images through the use of sound and dimension, I hope this project will arouse people’s awareness of cognitive disorders and to show the effect of our negative thoughts. The videos, which are designed to appeal to teens and young adults, visualize three common thinking traps: “Blaming,” “Labeling” and “Downplaying.”
ESSAY
RIGHT Posters for the “We Listen”
Campaign. The campaign focused on the Samaritans as “expert listeners” and included a series of unique and anonymous portraits of people facing away from the camera.
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understandably. And technically, as I didn’t use software to animate these elements, so I had to be creative through live-action. It seems like I can make anything, but how could I communicate the story aesthetically?
Blaming is you refuse to accept the existing situation, blaming yourself or others and focusing on who is to blame for problems rather than what you can do to solve the problem. Labeling is when we talk to ourselves or others in mean ways and use a single negative word to describe people even though we are too complex to be summed up in a single word. And downplaying is minimizing or dismissing positive qualities, achievements, or behaviors by telling yourself that they are unimportant or do not count. Downplaying transforms neutral or positive experiences into negatives. Finding metaphors that work both visually and technically for the animation is one of the biggest challenges for me. Visually, each video has to be paralleled in shapes, sizes, and materials. Also, the metaphor has to be able to support and communicate the idea clearly and
During my research, I came across a few ideas. For the video “Downplaying,” my first idea was to weigh positives and negatives on a scale represented by “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” to show behaviors and facts of downplaying oneself. But then I immediately realized that the structure of the scale is too complex than the other metaphors and too abstract to understand; it doesn’t communicate the story well. After a discussion with Ellen and Jennifer, I decided to choose a cake as a metaphor for “Downplaying” by experimenting with the size of the cake. To achieve this, I used ketchup and mustard as icing to represent the “negativity” in the video. When I squeeze the condiments on the cake, it becomes smaller and smaller, which signifies that when we tell ourselves that our positive qualities or achievements are unimportant or do not count, we disqualify ourselves and feel smaller and weaker. And for the other two videos “blaming” and “Labeling,” there is a plant and a box, and I offer emotions, sounds, and feelings to these objects.
LEFT My sketches for
storyboards of the animation“Blaming.” RIGHT My Previous
storyboards for the animation “Downplaying.”
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ESSAY
A plant is organic; it lives, and it has a feeling. Like the famous experiment: Good Apple, Bad Apple*, which shows the power of words by saying positive and negative things to apples. Here I want to evoke people’s empathy and communicate a message: blaming distracts us from accepting an existing situation or solving a problem. Instead of blaming ourselves or finding someone else to blame for a problem, we should take action to improve the situation. A box can be anything; it’s a container. In the second video “Labeling,” I want to say that sometimes we talk to ourselves or each other in a hostile way. Using negative labels to describe a person reduces them to a few harsh words. We should remove labels to let people shine. I am using paper as the medium in all my videos and exhibition because the paper is fragile and delicate just like our thinking traps. I believe we have the power to break out of it. In the meantime, I thought, how can I help people overcome their negative thoughts through the video? So here is a transition from
negative to positive in each video and ending happily. My message is that we can feel better and get a better result if we could change our perspective. I hope this project gets people to think about themselves and help them potentially take action. The act of creating can also be therapeutic and cathartic. Writing down my own story has been incredibly freeing and empowering. Starting from my personal experience with anxiety, I have researched cognitive disorders and Cognitive behavioral therapy, and I tried to incorporate this new knowledge in the animation. During the process, I felt release and pleasure when creating and watching the video, and It allows me to self-identify and take action to think positively in a relaxed way. My thesis helped me get out of my thinking trap; I hope it can also encourage and inspire others to do the same.
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STORYBOARD
The storyboard is one of the tools I used to visualize my ideas for the video. I spent lots of time refining storyboards including colors, motion and the narrative. This was important in preparation for shooting the video. STORYBOARD
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STORYBOARD
LEFT At the workshop with
IDEO’s designer in fall semester, I started brain-storming and generating ideas for visualing three thinking traps. RIGHRT My sketch books
and printed storyboards in the critique.
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STORYBOARD
Blaming is when you refuse to accept the existing situation, blaming yourself and others or focusing on who is to blame for problems rather than what you can do to solve the problem. TRAP 01
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Labeling is when we talk to ourselves or others in mean ways and use a single negative word to describe people even though we are too complex to be summed up in a single word. TRAP 02
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Downplaying is minimizing positive qualities, achievements, or behaviors by telling yourself that they are unimportant or do not count. Downplaying transforms neutral or positive experiences into negative ones. DOWNPLAING
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ANIMATION
After refining all three storyboards, I started shooting my first video for “Blaming;� This helped familiarize me with the camera and the light setting. The challenge for me was translating my vision from paper to video, using a variety of experimental techniques. ANIMATION
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LEFT I made almost everything
in the video myself using craft paper. I researched many elegant sculptures made of paper. RIGHT Working and creating is
another way of curing my anxiety. The act of creating can also be therapeutic and cathartic. I really enjoyed the process of making staffs myself. I felt relax and had lots of fun doing all the works myself and it helped my forget all my pressure.
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LEFT Animating the plant and shooting
the video in the green room. For the best result of the animation, Instead of stop motion, I animated the live-video. RIGHT I bought card board and made 6 small rotatable model cut on the board and rolled fishline around six models under the board. I connected each line to the leaves and pulling the line to make the leaf wilt.
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EXHIBITION
A successful exhibition is part of a successful thesis. The exhibition tells a story, and the story has to connect to the design concept fully. When this succeeds, the audience is touched. EXHIBITION
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BOTTOM I made my own
padestals. Because the objects I displayed are not too heavy, so I used forms as materials.
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GALLERY TALK
The thesis critic with designer Silas Munro made me re-think the concept, purpose and working process of my thesis and what I want to communicate through my works. GALLERY TALK
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Special thanks to Ellen Lupton Jennifer Cole Phillips Jason Gottlieb Abraham Burickson Shane Moritz To my dear friends: Vishnu Venugopal, Janani Ravichandran , Zhe Wen, Jay Li, Aurora Colón, Angel pan, Chase Body, Cynthia Zhu, Daniel Spurgin, Jenna Klein, Junyi Shan, Katja Fluekiger, Steffon Kelly, Kavya Barthwal, Yi Pan, Sallie Xu, Wan-Ting Kao, Potch Auacherdkul, Vidhi Trivedi, Mengxi Wei, Yunzi Liu, Zejun Wang. I can’t achieve without your help. And to my parents. Thank you for your endless love and support to help me pursue my MFA degree, I would be nowhere without your support. I love you so much. Create and design by Fangting Gu 2018
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THANKS
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Thinking traps are patterns of thought that tend to trigger our feelings of negativity and trap us in anxiety. This project creates messages designed to help people recognize their negative thoughts and build healthy thinking habits.
MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART GRAPHIC DESIGN MFA THESIS 2018