Hasta La Ideas

In the past three years, BSR’s HERproject has reached over 100,000 women in the workplace worldwide. The program uses a peer-to-peer education methodology to bring health awareness and services to female farm- and factory- workers. Their 2010 report on their local and international programs gives an impressive breakdown of the impacts these programs have had in the workplace and in communities around the world—Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Last month BSR and Berkeley-based design consultancy Tomorrow Partners launched HERproject Toolbuilder, a web-based application to build training tools for health education.

Tomorrow Partners gives some insight into their process:

We worked with BSR to map out the graphics needed to cover all the curriculum topics. In the process, we learned that while women everywhere share some universal needs, in order for information to resonate with them personally, it is critical for images to be culturally specific. What the partners really needed was a library of illustrations that cover topics spanning from general, reproductive, maternal, and mental health to family planning, nutrition, and harassment for each country.

The talented and well-traveled storyboard artist Marc Ericksen joined our project team to create seven archetypical families, representative of the cultures in which HERproject currently operates. Every topic and every detail, from the design of a salwar kameez to the placement of a hand to the way a family stands together, was considered, extensively researched, and vetted with HERproject’s global partners. Marc used these families, along with his skill for capturing emotion and subtlety to build a relatable narrative.

(more…)