A healthy future for all

Lopez Design wins Gold in the Visual Category for the 3rd edition of Business World’s BW Future of Design Awards — Branding for Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centers.

We came up with this unique idea of creating a template system of a circle and square: The circles would contain the standard illustrations that depicted what services the health centre provided. The square wrapped around doors and windows. Craftsmen from that local village filled up the borders of the circles and squares with the local art of that particular region.” At the grassroots level, this ensures the message is simple and direct, without any language barrier, empowering the people of every region to take ownership of their own wellness.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the first Health and Wellness Centre at Jangla, Bijapur district, Chhattisgarh. 2018

What design can do

The BW Design Awards has several members from the WDO — World Design Organization, formerly ICSID, which is an international NGO. The WDO vision is for a better world through design — ‘We strive to create a world where design enhances our economic, social, cultural, and environmental quality of life’. President Srini Srinivasan is passionate about sustainable development across communities, and has conviction about how cities work in shaping the future. Aligning with the vision of the WDO, the BW awards ‘recognize and felicitate the best prototype and finished designs by designers, architects, innovators and businesses…..across industries that are focused on touching human lives and making them Future Ready’. The theme this year was ‘design for a sustainable world’.

Visual design for a sustainable ecosystem

A paper by McGill University defines sustainability as: “Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In addition to natural resources, we also need social and economic resources. Sustainability is not just environmentalism. Embedded in most definitions of sustainability we also find concerns for social equity and economic development.”

We hear of sustainable livelihoods, sustainable architecture and sustainable products. It is less common to find sustainability through visual design, and so we are especially proud about our flexible branding via an indigenous system for the 150,000 Health and Wellness Centers across India.

Anthony Lopez emphasizes, “The brand identity system developed was executed without production of any physical entity and wastage of resources, through the most simple and inclusive medium of communication – the regional art.”

The fundamental challenge faced by Governing bodies was reaching out to a billion-plus across 650,244 villages and over 300 cities, officially speaking 22 languages and 1652 dialects with an inclusive voice and identity. The visual branding responded to the vision of the Ayushman Bharat program spearheaded by Health Minister Harsh Vardhan for ‘humanistic and people-centric branding’ for every local HWC giving dignity, equity and social justice in society, providing healthcare services to all. Our approach was sensitive to the needs of regional people and how we could bring them closer to their health centres by creating implicit trust and belonging.

Power in the hands of people

Our non-conformist approach did two things that few designers dare to do. We put the user at the steering wheel and the designer in the backseat, taking on the navigator’s role. Rather than a repetitive symbol that is pasted across the board, every center got its own identity with the crafts-persons from the local region creating their own patterns within the open template given. This led to a very beautiful series of solutions giving synchronicity to the whole movement of Ayushman Bharat, like sowing seeds across the country and watching the saplings come up like trees. Quoting from an article in The Print dated April 14, 2021: India has operationalised 75,532 Ayushman Bharat-Health and Wellness Centres so far despite the COVID-19 pandemic and is on track to functionalise 1.5 lakh HWCs by December 2022, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Wednesday. HWCs across India are continuing to grow and flower — a tribute to the agile power of design to respond, rather than being defined by a fixed prescription.

Written by Sujatha Shankar Kumar
Layout by Ajay Sharma
Artwork by Nishtha Sharma

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