Lina Maria Giraldo's Blog

I’m writing about my thesis idea and finally it’s more realistic. Three months to develop a new project is quite difficult and challenging. Many people have been working on their idea since they started school, but I decided throughout the master take different sets of classes to gain diverse skills to help communities. I took some programming, video and several design classes including solar design and design for Unicef, hoping that they will help me achieve my goal.  

My background is as a visual artist and sometimes my solution to solving social issues has been a creative response and not so much a practical one. After working in the most recent project with Latin-American immigrants: “Do you have a dream?”, I realized that I spent most of the time doing managing and administrative stuff like sending emails, phone calls, writing proposals for each school, etc. I got stuck waiting for responses of people or cancellations in the last minute. I understand this is a good part of project development so three months is definitely not the right time frame to develop a social project.

I have this great opportunity to work with Issa Nyaphga and his village in Cameroon. One of the ideas was to work in an educational tool that would help prevent HIV/aids, cholera and malaria. After I showed the presentation to my class, I started working and creating a timeline of tasks and future obstacles that I could encounter. I found myself confined in stress and anxiety because of the amount of work and the short time I have (two months and three weeks). It was irresponsible with the community and myself if I didn’t spend the right time doing the right research. I decided to experiment with the media, visualization and data so I can develop as much as possible and not have limitations of working with a particular community. I usually work from the particular to the universal but at this time I will do the opposite.

I will keep working on AIDS, Malaria and Cholera but using, simulations, visualizations, data and tones of creativity. My goal is in three months to have a visualization that will collect all this data in a fun a creative way in one application.

Bellow is my mood board that might give you an idea of what is the feeling I want to achieve:

2nd thesis presentation mood/inspiration board from Lina Maria Giraldo on Vimeo.

AZUKAR

An interactive visual health learning application for the reduction of Cholera, Malaria, HIV and  diarrhea.

Sicknesses like Cholera, HIV and Malaria are very common in developing countries especially those in tropical climates.  In many cases, the number of people infected could be reduced or transmission prevented tremendously if they practiced simple things like washing their hands, using condoms or the nightly use of mosquito nets.

A problem specific to the Tikar people in Cameroon is that accurate information regarding reproductive health is almost non-existence. Misinformation about contraception or HIV/Aids leads people to such things as ingesting poisons in attempt to abort and increasing the number of sexually transmitted diseases and death.

The lack of information on healthcare and the vast distances to obtain it, often leads people to use home remedies, instead of medicine in the prevention and treatment of diseases.

I would like to create an interactive interface where the community will learn in an instructive and visual way. This image-based interface will explain the different scenarios of how many people could get affected and how it would spread. To illustrate this, one of the models I would create would be an HIV simulation where you can click on different scenarios. The first one will simulate without the use of condoms and the second will show what would happen if people used condoms. A third variation would include people getting tested for HIV. I believe these simulations will help the community in a fun way to understand how easy diseases could be prevented.

My biggest challenge is to do it in a visual-only way, having in consideration that a large percentage of the people don’t know how to read or write. A visual interface would also solve one of the biggest issues: translation. This visual interface needs to be efficient enough to run on any kind of computer.

I believe this approach could be more effective than booklets or flyers because many people who receive these materials do not understand them. In my proposal, the user interface will be simple enough to understand the different scenarios, my goal is to give the opportunity to the community to learn in a fun way at the same time provides them with a better sense of reality.

I would like to pilot the project in Cameroon, but I believe this could be applicable in any other developing country.  An important aspect that supports this idea, is that there are projects that are already happening like one laptop per child, the Clinton foundation, Computer Aid International and smaller NGO’s who are striving to bring this awareness and resources to the communities. This project then comes in to provide all of these organizations with a support application for their core

In a few words:

What

I am developing a project that provides visualization applications to help understand different scenarios of the most prevalent preventable diseases.

Why

I am doing this project, because I want to help these communities and I want to make a change in developing countries, using the tools and knowledge that I have and that I am comfortable and proficient using.

Where

I will be working with developing communities, who don’t have access to education and are in the process of being provided with cheap and low energy computer access. These countries are mostly located in the tropical regions, where other organizations have already provided computer access.

How and User Scenario

The first pilot will be in Cameron with the Tikar people in Nditam, the closest town to one of their villages.  This community will receive computers through an ONG’s working towards education in the region. At the same time there are healthcare awareness programs that although active for some time, have not had support of technology to bring their points across. The application will allow them to bring their message across in a visual manner.

The application will be Open source and operating system independent, meaning it can run on MAC, PC and Linux. It would be ideal that it could be integrated into an existing learning platform like Sugar. Most likely it would be Java based. It will be language independent, making it useful for many different regions.

Additional

[Additionaly, schools that are already equipped with XO laptops, can add this application and students work on their own to build awareness of these diseases and how to control them.]