Camille Le Flem

Affective Data is a research project conducted to identify gaps in medical communication, offering a speculative alternative to collect, archive and communicate medical stories from a designer perspective. The process inquires the empathetic value of design and how it allows to bring back a sense of humanity into systemic datasets. The research is directed towards standards of accessibility within the medical communication process — both from the documentation procedure and the exchanges between patients and clinicians. 

My role is to bridge current and new forms of communication by making data more accessible, familiar and tangible for patients. By unpacking individual experiences and identifying communication challenges, the work aims to uncover personal stories and reveal possible applications of visual communication in the health area. I use data visualisation as a method for communicating these lines of inquiries to the general public as well as to an audience of clinicians, attempting to initiate a wider scope of possibilities around these topics.

I place myself as a facilitator, not an expert. By the means of interviews with specialists, workshops with patients and designs as visual responses, the study discusses how a visual communication practice could create a dialogue between medical facts and personal experience, in order to build more comprehensive and accessible records.

Learn more on the Affective Data website

The WIP 2021 Identity was born out of a recognition of the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in. In the midst of a global pandemic the College had to reappraise how to create an identity that represented an institution in flux. A design that could incorporate the student body in its truest and most authentic form.

Interpretive translations of the meaning of ‘work in progress’, provided by students in their mother tongue, were used to communicate personal perspectives and approaches towards the WiP show. The statements were revealed in an evolving and dynamic form representing the experimental, fluid and dynamic nature of a WiP show. The acting shape is reacting and interacting with the base identity: the institution, the ideals and similarities that we share by being part of the RCA community.

This WIP show is international and dynamic and the identity embodies these new realities.

The RCA2021 identity is an evolution of the WIP identity, building upon the fundamental principles that we established.

Our three core principles remained—the institution, students voices and their practice—however all three evolved to recognise the evolution of RCA2021. Whereas we focused on experimentation and journeys within the Work in Progress, RCA2021 is much more about crystallised and realised practices, alongside a feeling of celebration at reaching an exciting stepping stone.

We represented these feelings by the selection of objects, representing items that can be found in our surrounding, that formulate and influence our practice, collecting, combining and interacting to form new realities. The vibrant colour palette, evolving from the black and white of WIP represents the celebratory nature of the show. These bright and exciting shapes continue to reveal students voices, those that are celebrating what it truly means to be a graduating student at the Royal College of Art, and the feelings that go with that.

RCA2021 and its existence online brings to highlight how international and diverse our institution is, and our approach to the identity has been to celebrate, in the face of a changing world, that diversity and excitement.