Challenging norms
ANDY is an interdisciplinary team consisting of psychologists, therapists, doctors, coaches and communicators who have developed a program for parents who want to understand and be able to communicate the child's needs to the environment.
How come 15 % of Swedish kids don’t fit within society’s norms? Helena Holmgren and ANDY reached out to ODI with an idea on how to challenge society’s narrow scope of normality, and to reduce mental illness in young people.
With an already proven method for challenging norms and addressing mental illness, ANDY needed help to ideate and visualise their thoughts of an app that would help kids, teachers and caregivers strengthen their communication. They wanted to create a digital tool that would increase understanding and support acceptance about norm diversity.
ANDY needed to:
- concretize their ideas
- Explore the solution space within the digital realm
- Visualize their concept to inspire further funding
Being a start up at an early stage, there isn’t always room for extensive design efforts. But ANDY’s heartwarming mission, and the passionate driving force Helena manifests, inspired ODI to give it a go anyway.
Meeting up with Helena Holmgren, founder of ANDY, and Paul Jones Winlund, service designer, we roughed out some ideas to run with. A couple of quick iterations and the concept was tangible enough to show to other stakeholders. Later, when there was some funding, we drew out a simple UI with some branding parameters and created a prototype showcasing the main interaction patterns. One Day Interacts delivery can be summarised as:
- Early sketches, flows & visualisations
- Ideation on digital learning
- Support in creating pitch decks and presentation materials for further funding
- UI components & prototyping for an MVP of the mobile App.
- Essential brand components
Most important for us was the well-being of designing for good that came out of this engagement.
But we would also like to believe we helped out in kick starting the process of exploring digital extensions of an already intelligent and dedicated vision to push society towards a place where everyone fits, and strengthening kids mental health and sense of self.