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How to alleviate anxiety through communication

When you're driving through a town you don’t know and you can’t find a street sign anywhere – and for the sake of argument, let's say your GPS isn’t working – what do you feel? Frustration? Fear? Hopelessness? Me, I have to go with rage, because thoughtfully placed signs would solve my problem, allowing me to understand where I am and where I am going.

Now multiply those feelings times twenty.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the inability to communicate and interact with others is the common symptom of all sufferers of autism. In a way, their lives are missing all of the street signs.

Our client, Sloan Architects, designed the master plan for the Anderson Center for Autism in Staatsburg, New York. In researching a white paper-style brochure for them about the project, I spent a day there. The inability to communicate, I learned, is a major cause for the challenging behavior associated with autism (the sort of behavior script writers like to use to dramatic effect).

Anderson overcomes communication gaps in ways that are familiar to all of us. One of them is iconography. Throughout Anderson you will find boards covered with laminated illustrations of common wants or needs, like a glass with an orange, or a toilet. Students reference the icon boards to show teachers what they need, to follow process, and to have structure and order. It helps alleviate the stress, fear and rage that can come in moments of overstimulating chaos.

When they created the master plan for Anderson, Sloan Architects understood the value of that type of communication. They spent time learning what their client and what the students needed. They understood that the environment they were creating could be founded upon alleviating stress, and they came up with solutions that addressed the needs of children with autism and the educators who work with them.

One elegant result was their approach to student housing. They color coded it. There's a blue house and a yellow one, a green one and a red one. Students create color associations with which house is theirs. Information delivered; communication achieved; source of stress – not being able to find your way home in a more traditional, unified dormitory setting where everything looks the same — eliminated through design.

It takes communication with your client to find solutions like this, and that's the case with any business. You get to know your client. You get to know their audience. You come to understand how to distill their identity into a simple idea that delivers a message quickly and easily, because most audiences just want to understand what you’re trying to tell them.

They don't want to figure it out, they don't want to be challenged, they don't want to bask in the beauty of your delivery. They want to know where they are going in a single glance, and they won't appreciate it until they understand it's somewhere they want to be.

It takes sensitivity and lot of hard work to communicate effectively. That's why it happens so infrequently, and that's why I spend so much time lost on city streets.