Dopamine Decor is a publication designed as a response to ISTD’s 2024 Joybringer Brief and was awarded membership. The publication aims to demonstrate why our homes should not be deemed solely as storage space or a place to sleep, but as a source of great joy.
This project was awarded membership from ISTD.
Paying more attention to the way our homes are arranged and decorated can positively impact our mental wellbeing. Dopamine Decor carries forward an eclectic aesthetic to emulate the feeling of a house comprised of different rooms. The book houses real people’s joyful memories of home to emulate comfort and security.
The publication is built out of five chapters, all named after a room in a typical house. The chapters outline what can be implemented in that specific room to improve the mental wellbeing of the general public. Due to the eclectic theme of the publication, it was vital that each chapter had its own character and presence just like rooms in a house.
Thus, the chapters are each separated by a divider page which functions as a ‘door’ into the following room, and each have a different primary colour from the colour palette. Each divider features a chapter number designed to look like a house door number.
Each chapter features a typographic response to an object from that room — For example, fridge-magnet- style typography in the kitchen — this further separates the rooms and gives each of them their own character.
A key insight which elevated the publication is that a house is not a home without the people who inhabit it. Research proved that a joyful home contains people’s memories. The inclusion of physical photographs or sentimental objects in our home has positive implications on our mental wellbeing.
I conducted primary research via a survey to collect real people’s memories from key rooms of the house — for each of the chapters. These real memories of home imbued with joy and nostalgia bring a human aspect into the publication in the form of tip-ins. The tip-ins aim to resonate with the audience and enable the publication to be accessible to all.
To further emphasise that each of the five chapters is a ‘room’, the book was bound using coptic binding in five separate signatures.
