Innovation Action is a website designed and built to host innovative, open-source solutions to help people collectively address global challenges.
The Problem
The current global context sees us facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical devices and protective equipment are vital for the protection and safety of staff and patients yet demand far exceeds supply. Despite humanitarian efforts to design and produce rapid solutions, the results are either not contextually suitable or lack a viable route to manufacture.
COVID-19 aside, there are and will continue to be global challenges that will see countries struggle requiring a collective effort to develop and produce solutions.
A Global Hub for Open Source Innovation
Open Source design principles aim to produce collaborative ideas and designs that become freely available for anyone to use for the greater good. During COVID-19, multiple rapid Open Source innovations are being shared to assist the medical crisis. Currently, designs have individual websites, which makes comparisons of viable projects and overall efforts difficult. Although COVID-19 has justified the need for more open-sourcing, there are many other challenges that would benefit from a solution hub.
Global challenges can affect anyone and everyone. People from different cultural backgrounds, countries and various abilities will contribute different points of view, experiences and expertise. However, technology needs to facilitate this.
Solution
Process
As COVID-19 is such an immediate global issue, this website needed to be designed and built as quickly as possible. Only having 14 days to complete this project, efficient communication, as well as quick research and iterations, were key. All planning and feedback meetings were remote. This proved a valuable learning experience, making the short production time much more of an achievement.
One of the most demanding parts of this project was ensuring designs aligned with low bandwidth guidelines. We always design websites with an accessibility first approach, however, making the website accessible both in terms of usability and geography provided a new challenge. Close collaboration between design and development was therefore imperative to guarantee the website performed and looked as desired.
Outcome
Working alongside multiple partners, Passio designed and built an accessible website that is currently dedicated to hosting open-source designs for COVID-19 medical devices and protective equipment. Designs are collected, vetted and shared with:
- As many relevant professionals, organisations and businesses as possible for them to easily compare, use and contribute to solutions.
- Manufacturers, for them to easily search for solutions to whom they can offer manufacturing.