EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS EDUCATIONAL TOOLKIT

BACKGROUND:
The current CCHMC safety curriculum does not meet the needs of individuals with intellectual disabilities, including current staff and interns. Learning materials need to be revised to promote safety and participation.

GOAL:
Develop an adapted Emergency Preparedness curriculum optimized for employees with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) while remaining suitable for all learning styles.

OBJECTIVES:

Revise and adapt existing training materials
Empower individuals through training and awareness
Integrate new materials as learning tools

MY ROLE:
I was the Industrial Design Lead on a multidisciplinary team of 6. As the only industrial designer on the project, I was inspired to create a physical educational medium to engage tactile learning cues. This led me to develop and prototype an interactive card game used in conjunction with traditional learning materials.

SKILLS:

User Interviews
Thematic Analysis
Sketching
Game Design and Prototyping
User Testing

DMI INFORMATION:

Design Management Institute Winner Entry

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

To fully capture the variety of skills and learning styles of people with I/DD, we created five personas representing the participants that we interviewed.

ACCESSIBLE EDUCATION STYLES

With our primary and secondary research, different educational tools were benchmarked on a matrix to identify the widest spread of educational needs that can be designed for.

IDEAL EDUCATION STYLE FOR EACH PERSONA

To ensure the materials were accessible and universal, we overlayed the personas over the materials to determine the educational format of the curriculum.

MATERIALS CHOSEN

IDEATION

My role within the team focused on developing the visual identity for the game, both in the physical card form, as well as the content within.

I had the opportunity to test with 8 I/DD employees at CCHMC to determine best visual cues, form, and activities to include within the card game. This allowed me to create cards that can be used across all comprehension levels.

Initial prototypes were created and distributed to the CCHMC team in order to implement into their existing curriculum in advancing education for people with I/DD.