Creative Collective of India
CCI is a digital toolkit of creative challenges for anyone who wants to make, verify, and publish creative material that inspires people across India to adopt positive behaviours to protect themselves and the larger community against COVID-19.
Role: Behaviour Design and UX Researcher
Partners: Design and Technology organisations across India (such as Fractal Analytics, Tekdi Technologies, Lopez Design, Bizosys, Vihara Innovation Network, and more)
Users: Media and content creators across India (including advertisers, cinema and theatre artists, visual media artists, designers, animators, puppeteers, poets, and more)
Sector: Health, Technology
Project Website: https://creativecollectiveofindia.org/
The Brief
The crisis of COVID-19, in this digital age, calls for an established community sourced collective, that equips India to put out authentic public health information for all its citizens.
Conceptualised as a repository of authentic information, design callout, and certification platform for effective communication material on COVID-19 across India, the Creative Collective of India Toolkit and corresponding certification platform are currently being designed by a multidisciplinary team of technology experts and behaviour, graphic, UI, and UX designers.
The challenge of a complex and multi-stage design challenge like this is to prioritise tasks, teams, and deliverables to fit into tight timelines, while being cautious of every detail to encourage the use of only authentic and verified public health information.
My Design Process
As a key member of the Behaviour Design Research team, I am putting together the toolkit of information and creative challenges for designers, advertising companies, and anyone who wants to make and publish creative material (films, posters, cartoons, stories, ad campaigns, etc.) that compels people across India to adopt positive behaviours to protect themselves and the larger community from COVID-19.
We first started by defining the design process of Ideate > Create > Certify > Circulate. After drawing out the larger process we wanted creators to follow, we defined and conducted in-depth research on the key design challenges we wanted creators to address by conducting basic ethnographic research with everyday consumers of content (on social media and otherwise), professional content creators, and health experts. Our design challenges, including Maintaining Hand Hygiene, Wearing Masks, Practicing Social Distancing, Being kind to everyone, and Stopping misinformation, among others, were key behaviours that are essential to combating the pandemic, need more innovative creative content, or are being miscommunicated in everyday social-media messaging in India.
I am currently working in collaboration with senior experts and organisations from the fields of Media and Advertising, UI & UX Design, Software Development, and Behaviour Design (such as Fractal Analytics, Tekdi Technologies, Lopez Design, Bizosys, Vihara Innovation Network, and more) to create an evaluation metric that will be used to certify the creative content submitted on our platform.
Outcome
The Creative Collective of India COVID-19 Toolkit’s beta website can be viewed at: https://creativecollectiveofindia.org/
We are still in the process of designing the toolkit and platform, and it will be officially launched by June 2020.
