Pharmacy and graphic design students
from around the world collaborating online
to raise public awareness of critical health issues in Kenya
The VIP project ultimately aims to increase public awareness of six health-related concerns identified as debilitating public health in many developing nations:
The project hopes that by bringing pharmacists and graphic designers together to work in collaboration, detailed research reports and visual campaigns will be produced that can actively contribute to increased public awareness of such health-related concerns in specified locations in Kenya.
VIP has identified rural communities and local hospitals in Kenya to focus the project. Winam lies in Kisumu, the provincial headquarters of Nyanza Province. The Nyanza Provincial General Hospital (NPGH) is a referral point for over 16 district hospitals in western Kenya, which each year deal with hundreds of abandoned patients. Reasons for abandonment can be related, amongst other things, to a lack of appropriate knowledge within the community to deal with certain diseases. The VIP project aims to help raise awareness and knowledge within such communities, to ultimately reduce abandonment levels and reduce the reliance on the hospitals such as NPGH.
Phase one of the project will take place over a seven-week period and link over 50 pharmacy students and their teachers from a variety of universities and colleges around the world. Using the unique Omnium Software™ interface, participants will interact in small working teams of five (with each student in each team residing in a different global location) to explore one specific pharmacy related health issue from their own geographic settings and cultural perspective. During this time, each team will be joined by an expert teacher/mentor to guide them through their working process. In addition, all the teams will be visited online by established professionals and educators to provide their own feedback and ideas to the work taking place. Each group will collectively work to produce a detailed research report and final brief for the graphic design students to begin working from.
Phase two will see over 50 graphic design students, also from a variety of universities and colleges around the world, join the project and initially link up with each pharmacy team for a period of two weeks. Having been briefed by the pharmacy students, who in effect will now be acting as clients, the designers will form similar working teams of five to progress their own visual concepts and interpretations for a further five weeks. The graphic design teams will explore their own collaborative working processes to define creative concepts that aim to visually communicate the specific pharmacy-related issues and promote awareness to the local community of Winam, Kenya
