Records for Life
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global challenge to reimagine the child health record. As a guest advisor from Johns Hopkins, Manish Arora worked with the MICA graphic design team whose India-focused entry received an honourable mention.
- Role
- Guest advisor, with J. Douglas Storey (Johns Hopkins), Islam Elsedoudi (IDEO) and Lee Davis (MICA)
- Team
- Amanda Buck, Nate Gulledge, Sally Maier and Chen Yu, MFA in Graphic Design, MICA, led by Jennifer Cole Phillips
- Result
- Honourable mention, from 300 submissions by teams in 41 countries
- When
- 2013–14; advisory work at MICA, Baltimore, 11–13 October 2013
The challenge
Records for Life asked designers to re-examine the child health record and design new ways to track vaccine doses accurately, make the record easier to read and use, and encourage the behaviour change that makes health workers and families value it. Awards of up to $50,000 were offered, with winning designs to be piloted in as many as ten countries. Entries were judged by representatives of the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
The entry: A Record for Life
The MICA team reimagined the immunisation record in a portable, simplified form that is easy to reproduce and to digitise, adding scalability and redundancy to the medical data system. The proposal focused on India, with elements designed to work globally. The team built it through brainstorming, prototyping and narratives of the experiences of caregivers, health workers and government survey-takers with today’s child health records.
Manish Arora was then at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as UGC Raman Post-Doctoral Fellow in Health Communication Design.
In print
Sources: MICA, ‘Students Recognized by Gates Foundation for Reimagining Children’s Health Records’; Design Observer, ‘Reimagine the Child Health Record with the Gates Foundation’; his CV.