SpotLight
The Project:
We were tasked with bringing awareness of allergies and anaphylaxis to college campuses by Dr Ruchi Gupta, a leading researcher in this field. The current state of the issue is that there is a rise in the number of students coming in with allergies.However, no measures are being taken to accomodate for the safety and well being of these students. Our Team set out to tackle this challenge using a multi pronged approach, tackling various touchpoints in the life of a college student with allergies. We called this campaign 'SpotLight on campus allergies.'
SpotLight is a portfolio of solutions , of which our team worked on facilitating emergency responses. We delivered to client all our research data, the concept of the Epi Box( which is essentially an emergency fixture containing Epinephrine autoinjectors that informs the user on how to use the devices), the data regarding our failed concept Epi Net (Text-based, crowdsourced emergency response) and a guideline for how to conduct an emergency simulation that can be rolled out to other campuses.
The Process:
The Solution
My Role
Within our team I played the role of researcher, graphic designer, simulation engineer, and prototyper. ​I learnt how to initiate action where uncertainty prevailed, and I learnt to be comfortable with ambiguity.
We started out by intervieweing 35 individuals, including Food service staff, students with allergies, and administrators. Through our research, we found that in the case of an allergy related emergency in dining halls, there was no clear procedure for the bystanders or food service staff to follow to save the student's life, save for calling 911. from this we derived our objective statement: "How might we empower bystanders and dining hall staff to react during an Anaphylaxis attack?"
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From this insight we proceede to map out several possible ssolutins, of which we prototyped and simulated two, the Epi Box, and Epi Net.