Diabetes@School: An educational video series
Client: Canadian Paediatric Society
Project completed while at Pivot Design Group
In a nutshell
The Canadian Paediatric Society identified a gap in knowledge dissemination around the care of students across Canada who have been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.
We were engaged to create a series of 10 animated videos that each focus on one core concept, such as low blood sugar, high blood sugar, physical activity, food, insulin, and what to do in an emergency.
ROLE
Project Lead, Design Researcher, Art Director, Script, Storyboard
TOOLS
Pencil/paper, Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects
COLLABORATORS
Sara Yong, Julian Brown
01 Starting point
Approximately 1 in 300 school-aged children in Canada have type 1 diabetes (T1D), a lifelong autoimmune disease where the pancreas no longer produces insulin.Careful management is required — this includes things like administering insulin, checking blood glucose, and monitoring food and physical activity.
The Canadian Paediatric Society discovered that children across Canada were receiving inconsistent care at school. Some Provinces had policies in place, while others did not. The Canadian Paediatric Society created a website — Diabetes @ School — to provide resources to policy-makers, educators, school staff, and parents. We were tasked with creating a series of educational videos to help disseminate the information, offering it in a way that is accessible, clear and concise.
Main goals for the series:
Empower teachers and school staff (from our personas, we learned that many are afraid, simply because they don’t know how they can support students with T1D)
Present complicated health concepts in a clear and engaging way
02 Approach
We began with a detailed review of the current landscape — specifically other diabetes management videos, expanding into management of other chronic conditions. We considered the content explored in each video, look and feel, and other tonal qualities.
We identified some engaging visual styles and explored them further through multiple iterations of moodboards. Knowing that we were going to be creating a series of videos, we wanted to have a common thread — an engaging visual element that tied all of them together, while allowing them to stand on their own. From there, Dilly was born!
03 Solution
Working closely with the Director of Communications at the Canadian Paediatric Society, I developed and edited the script for each video — ensuring that they shared the same friendly and engaging voice.
Keeping the primary target audience in mind (educators, school-staff, policy-makers) it was really important to present the complex health concepts in a light and down-to-earth manner. We were able to achieve this through the language we chose for each script, the tone of voice, and the bright and memorable illustrations.
04 Impact
The series was launched in both English and French. The AODA-compliant video series has received over 500K views.
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