Design for Social Impact | Spot The Dot
Role / Fields: Social Design, Service Design, Experience Design.
Team: Brooke Dickens, James Macintyre, Anna MacGregor, Sarah Separovich.
Brief: To investigate how design can be used as a vehicle for social change, designing in response to a UN Sustainable Goal and to produce a design artefact as the final outcome.
Note: Due to the sensitivity of our subject matter and lived experiences of which our research draws upon, much of the report and appendix has been redacted for confidentiality. As a result it is best to follow the guided points throughout to understand the design process, while the report snippets act as supporting and evidential figures.
Our team selected the United Nations goal, "good
health and wellbeing for all: ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing
for all at all ages" to guide our design.
health and wellbeing for all: ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing
for all at all ages" to guide our design.
Challenge: Skin cancer is highly prevalent in Australia due to our famously harsh climate. While it is highly preventable, there remains to be a substantial death toll that disproportionately impacts rural Australians. Our team proceeded to ideate how we could seek to improve the healthcare and treatment of skin cancer among rural Australians.
Internal Consideration: As a result of lockdown, this project was conducted almost exclusively online, and by a team of members with little to no personal experience of the rural Australian lived experience. With this in mind, we conducted extensive research that focussed on developing a comprehensive understanding and empathy for a rural way of life to ensure we developed a sensitive, yet effective design solution.
Final Iteration: A travelling fair that seeks to bring communities together for a skin-check as to adapt to rural townships by subverting the healthcare seeking process.
Discovery: Sample of our initial discovery research to build a foundationary understanding of our problem space.
Define: Based on our initial discovery we were able to reveal patterns that would guide further, more in depth research through a variety of unique design research methods.
Building a picture: We then developed a variety of user personas to help humanise the insights and findings of our data. This better enabled us to design a solution that spoke to humans rather than written insights.
Brainstorming: With our personas in mind, we began ideating a vast variety of concepts that spoke to our brief, while being informed by our new found understandings.
Iterating: With a stack of post-it note ideas in mind now put on paper, we began scrutising and attempting to break out concepts to iterate a more robust solution. In doing so we recruited the help of experts and original interview participants.
Iterating: With the feedback and knowledge gained from our previous round of iteration, we discovered a variety of new threats and opportunities to guide our development.
A concept comes to life: With our Spot the Dot concept developed on paper, we proceeded to mockup drawings, characters and further material to help visualise and lift the concept into reality.
Details that make it work: A key risk we identified with our fair concept was the ability for it to exist without visitors participating in its core cause and purpose. In particular with our older demographic who we identified as being attitudinally resistant to the risks of skin cancer.
As a result we took inspiration from blood drives that are known in Australia for tokening Mars bars and lollipops. This led to us designing an incentives system that utilises vouchers to be used at the fair that primarily target younger audiences. This is done to incentivise older demographic visitors to participate in a skin check in order to receive a voucher that allows their younger family members to further enjoy the fair.
As an alternative, the same incentive system works as to allow older demographic members to receive vouchers that allow them to claim locally produced goods - further substantiating community spirit.
Retrospect: Finally, we proceeded to critically evaluate our concept to identify successes and weaknesses in order to further iterate upon opportunities for improvement.
Appendix Sample
Research: Online Ethnography
Research / Ideation: Affinity Diagramming
Ideation: Brainwriting / Sketching
- Full report and appendix available upon request -