The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Media and Design London Metropolitan University

‘A portmanteau of ‘psychology’ or ‘psychoanalysis’ and ‘babble’ – a form of language which misuses buzz-words and jargon from serious clinical diagnosis and applies them to more everyday subjects’.

Within the context of Graphic Design, Design and Motion practice, and the wider context in which they are situated – the term ‘psychobabble’ can help to describe the  ‘information overload’ of contemporary culture; the need for people to use digital technologies like Twitter, blogging, Facebook et al to jam the blogosphere with the insignificant details of their lives; our obsession with ourselves, the self-diagnosing of our condition and the sharing of this with an ‘on-line’ community; how we measure ourselves against the images we see around us, as the space between the public and the private begins to blur or collapse.

Many of the projects displayed here deal with how human beings communicate in an increasingly complex world  - some deal directly with psychological problems, with human interaction and perception, and many look at how to restore a sense of more tactile human qualities in a removed digital environment. 

If Graphic Designers, and designers generally, create the made world – then they have a responsibility to understand the effects of that world on its occupants, and to smooth the path of human interaction amongst the ‘psychobabble’ of  mass communication.