Global Health Envisioning: 2030
Client: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Designed at Intentional Futures
My role: Lead designer / illustrator / animator
Global Health Envisioning was an intense 5 month project focused on the future of healthcare in a digital world. As lead designer on the project, I worked closely with producers and Global Health workers to create a system of assets that could accompany talks given at the 2015 Global Partners Forum.
The main asset was a video looking at women’s health in the developing world 10 years ago, today, and in 2030. The video which was shown to a 500 person+, diverse audience had to touch on a multitude of subjects. It became a great discussion piece, and was used in conjunction with a powerpoint that broke down the individual scenarios.
Research and early iterations
The first major challenge for this project was how do we depict data without showing...data? An envisioning video is an exercise in future forecasting - it can't be so specific that it gets picked apart by experts, but not so abstract that it's meaningless. I explored many possible approaches from the very geometric and abstract to the literal mapping of statistics to human forms. There was the added resource constraints that meant we weren't going to be able to capture live footage, so everything would need to be illustrated, collected, or curated by our team. We ultimately felt there needed to be a humanity in the video that abstract figures just couldn't convey, so the final styles merged abstract data renderings with carefully curated, parallaxing photos.
Storyboarding and visual tests
My assistant editor and I spend a long time testing different animation approaches while I worked on storyboarding out the video. We had a number of changes to the narrative structure as we worked with our client to weave in points that closely aligned with their 2030 goals, which slowed the process but ultimately made for a very pointed and specific story.
Data explorations
There were huge shifts in our depictions of data over the months. We needed to convey connectedness, digital webs, integrated data, and individual health profiles (while focusing on privacy) in a very general looking way. I taught myself to use Particular during this process, and was able to generate some data-y animation flows.
Presence at the Global Partners Forum
Early concepts of our presence at the forum anticipated a bigger footprint. Initial ideas were to set up kiosks for live social commentary on the different talks, and community boards to connect participants.
Our actual presence was much more simple and added cohesiveness to the environment of the Westin. The one collaborative feature we did provide was comment and response cards, that were illustrated onsite by me, and built into a feature board of “2030 Goals and Ideas”.