Creative Brief
Goal
Text from the Graphicacy website: PATH came to Graphicacy with the desire to share, online and in print, new scientific information around the critical connection between malnutrition and diarrheal disease (DD).
From the client: Communicate in a simple, "warm" style the connection between diarrheal disease and malnutrition. Eating more doesn't always solve the problem if disease is damaging the gut in a way that reduces/interferes with nutrient absorption.
Role
- Graphicacy: Jeff Osborn & Will Merrow
- Illustration: Catherine Madden
- PATH: An international nonprofit organization working to save lives and improve health, especially among women and children. Their focus is to accelerate innovation across five platforms – vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, devices, and system and system innovations.
Process
Discovery
Observations
Our visual path takes us from the origin of disease – a village scene with huts, something indicating exposed food/eating, maybe some water (dirty) and someone defecating. These can be abstract and not in scale to each other but composed as a unit.
Below is a photo of some huts we can use as inspiration for our village scene.
http://sustainnovate.ae/resources/others/_pageimage/Kenya_village.jpg
Flies and simple abstracted bacteria/pathogens trace a path from the village to our main child character.
The central figure is a child about 3 years old. This can be suggestive of a sub-Saharan child but not too detailed. Gender doesn't matter. We don't have to show detailed anatomy at all – just an area around the gut that is inflamed. The pose can possibly be more natural and compact than the placeholder icon in the sketch.
At the base of our core graphic we plan to do a side-by-side zoom in views of the gut lining – one healthy/one damaged. Each will be described ultimately with a short block of text (the layout incorrectly has two blocks of text talking about the damaged gut.)
Reference idea
From my communications with the team:
One thought: we could have slightly more specific illustrations in the main graphic, and the icons facilitating the text takeaway points could simply be drawn from that main illustration. There could even be more generic icons under those main header illustrations (such as oral vaccine).
This might be a helpful reference that shows this idea (from a project I did with Nicole Rager Fuller at Science News, when I worked there):
- Kids in developing countries ingest dangerous pathogens every day, due to unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation and hygiene. These stomach bugs cause chronic diarrhea and other infections that can make children sick over and over again and cause long-term damage to the gut.
- Repeated attacks from these stomach bugs and resulting chronic illnesses can contribute to long-term gut damage, called environmental enteropathy (EE).
- EE is a key factor to malnutrition in the following ways:
- Healthy bacteria in the gut can’t fully develop, and thus are unable to appropriately break down food so that the body can absorb nutrients.
- Intestinal villi are blunted, decreasing the surface area for nutrient absorption.
- Increased permeability in the gut lining allows nutrient molecules to slip through without being absorbed.
- Inflammation suppresses appetite.
- When kids are malnourished, their bones and brains don’t get the nutrients they need to grow properly. When they miss key nutrients during this critical growth window, this physical and cognitive stunting cannot be undone.
- Children who are physically and cognitively stunted are more likely to struggle in school, earn lower wages, and die early.
- EE interferes with the protective power of oral vaccines.
- Oral vaccines are compromised because the virus needs to replicate in the intestine to have an immune response. In EE, the body’s adaptive response to repeated onslaughts of dangerous pathogens is a hyperstimulated mucosal immune response in the gut, which can destroy a vaccine before the body has time to make the intended protective antibodies
We also found other approved and easy-to-understand research sources:
- Gut damage identified as cause of vaccine failure, malnutrition: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/uovh-gdi121415.php
- What will make vaccines work better in developing countries? http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/15/health/rotavirus-vaccine-bangladesh/index.html
- Half the kids in this part of India are stunted: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/opinion/half-these-kids-are-stunted.html
- Video: Sanitation and nutrition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWIr-eJ8FAs
Key scientific illustrations
Concepts → Blueprint
Approach
I decided to work with illustrator Catherine Madden, who has a hand-drawn, sketchnote style that our team thought would match the storytelling needs of this difficult topic.
Illustrating processes
The gut lining damage caused by DD can result in physical and cognitive stunting in children with devastating setbacks for future development. Graphicacy produced an information graphic combining simple explanatory diagrams with friendly and colorful illustrations that helped invite viewers to explore, and begin to understand, a fairly complex, and often grim, topic.
Readers were guided down a visual path that laid out the environmental conditions facilitating the spread of this disease, zoomed in to show specifically how pathogens damage the lining of the gut causing serious problems with nutrient absorption, explained some of the developmental consequences suffered by malnourished children, and then offered some basic steps toward solutions and a call to action.
These types of information graphics can be broken apart to be used in varied contexts, such as websites, slideshows, and as excerpts on social media, leading to more in-depth essays.
