CCA News
Design for Home HIV Test Results in Top IDEA Award
Posted on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, by Sarah Owens
California College of the Arts alum Tony Meredith (BFA Industrial Design 2008), in conjunction with his team at frog design, received IDSA’s (Industrial Designers Society of America) highest honors—gold placement—in the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition. Meredith and his team were honored for their design work on Project Masiluleke, a groundbreaking mission that uses mobile technology to address the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and tuberculosis (TB) epidemics in South Africa.
The IDEA Awards is the premier international competition honoring design excellence in products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research, and concepts.
About Project Masiluleke
Project Masiluleke is a bold effort that reaches a large percentage of South Africa’s population due to the near 90-percent cell phone–adoption rate in the region. After only three weeks in beta testing, daily average call volume to the National AIDS Help Line in Johannesburg tripled!
Project Masiluleke's first phase was officially launched October 1, 2008, as a million text messages were sent to mobile phone users in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. According to frog design's website, “The messages were sent to encourage usage of low-cost diagnostic tools; walk patients through the testing process; and guide them into care should they need it, and encourage healthy preventative behaviors even if they don’t.”
For the second phase, plans are underway to implement “virtual call centers” by augmenting existing help-line services with teams of highly trained, regimen-savvy persons who are HIV positive. These individuals will work remotely to field questions from the general public and offer counseling via mobile telecommunication devices.
Counselors will be closely vetted, trained, and challenged with representing so-called gold-star patients–those persons who are extremely knowledgeable about HIV transmission, diligent about their own treatment regimen, and intimately familiar with the complexities associated with an HIV-positive diagnosis.
The third phase of the project is a design for a do-it-yourself HIV test that utilizes saliva rather than blood to detect whether a person has produced antibodies to the virus, which, if positive, indicates a person has been exposed to the HIV virus. Saliva-based HIV testing is affordable and effective in helping those who have been exposed to the HIV virus seek proper medical attention, including counseling.
Packaging for the test was designed by Meredith and his frog design team members. It will accommodate both English- and Zulu-speaking audiences. As the current HIV-infection rate in KwaZulu-Natal exceeds 40 percent, the design team hopes this testing method, which can be administered at home, will provide a new level of privacy and anonymity that encourages more at-risk persons to get tested. (Funding is currently being secured to locally manufacture and distribute the test kits to those in need at no cost.)
About Alum Tony Meredith
Meredith joined frog design just three weeks after graduating from CCA's Industrial Design Program in May 2008. By August 2008 he had already become involved with Project Masiluleke. Meredith is excited and inspired by his work: “The most inspiring part about this project is the opportunity to affect the lives of people and challenge social stigmas in a way that has positive effects to both their lives and the lives of their entire community. One of largest challenges to stopping the HIV epidemic in South Africa is changing the way the community feels about routine testing for the disease. Just knowing your serostatus is the first step.”
IDSA awarded the frog design team's packaging for Project Masiluleke its highest honor—an International Design Excellence Gold Award (IDEA). IDSA affiliate and ECCO Design President and founder Eric Chan summed up their excitement, “Thorough research leads to sensible packaging design that helps to stop the AIDS pandemic in South Africa. This utilizes every element of the packaging to the maximum use for communication, storage and transportation. The system also connects the user to online help. Packaging design could help elevate humanity.”
The 2009 IDEA Awards winners will be celebrated at a ceremony on September 26 in Miami.
Additional Project Masiluleke collaborators include Pop!tech, iTeach, Praekelt, Aricent, Nokia Siemens, and others. It is frog design's hope to expand these partnerships to get local health care providers, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and government agencies to better share information and resources via a designated website. frog hopes this will “increase access to diagnostic tools and regimens as well as prove their effectiveness in some of the most remote and under-served regions on earth.”
Related
Visit frog design to learn more about Project Masiluleke.
Visit IDSA for additional information about IDSA, including the IDEA Awards.
[Images courtesy of frog design]