With in 24 hours, from Friday to Saturday, I grouped with 3 people from Northwestern and Upenn, and delved into the prompt question: How might we raise awareness about food allergies and improve access to treatment for anaphylaxis (food allergy) on college campuses.
Allergies aren’t just kids’ stuff. In fact, what we learned from Dr. Ruchi Gupta, M.D., M.P.H. that lot's of students got there first time allergy at school. Truley, college students start to live away from home for the first time, and they may have social pressure to carry EPI pen(s) ( epinephrine self-injector, the treatment of allergy), to share mixing food with friends or to tell others about their food allergy situation.
After talking with student's in Canteen, as well as the chef and staff, we learned the protocol for School catering has done as much as they could. They have certain nutritionist that handling all the allergy information of students, and they offer walk-in time for students to update their food allergy details. And they strictly cook under such guidance to avoid allergenic food.
On the other hand, on students' side, it seem that they do not have enough experience using or even learning about the EPI Pen, so they may not even think of using it to save people they care when people around them need one dose of injection. (Side note: we also learned how to use it only one day before the interview!) And this finding led us to our design direction- To create more awareness in Cateen, where people is having food and willing to learn about related knowledge.
The billboard in Canteen, full of all sorts of information. Our challenge will be, how to make the certain information about epi pen stands out?
Brainstorming, ideation, mock-up....being into the iteration is our most common part. But every time it just came out with novel ideas to each project.
We finally decide to use poster to illustrate how to use the epi pen. After we printed out, we saw the model of EPI Pen we used as our training staying there and a thought jump into our minds "why don't we just hang up the EPI pen there and let everyone try on it" And that led us to our final outcome, at the end of the 24 hours.
It is an interactive poster to help audience to generate the awareness of food allergies and be familar with proper treatment.
The vibrant color and the catching headline "stab me save me" worked well during testing!
In addition, instead of the redundant instruction on the original package, we redesigned our demo one as well with simple rhymed taglines: "Pull the blue cap high -It's time to be bold! Press the orange cap to thigh - Count to 10 while you hold!"
The result? Everyone love the cute character and really want to stab him;). It is interesting to learn that to generate awareness sometimes could be a really important outcome for certain problem, and is definitely not the low-hanging fruit. And also to change a little more on the original product ( the 2D poster to a 2.5D interactive poster) could help the result become much better.
