How Information Architecture Can Save the World: IA of a Pandemic Response
When cities locked down as COVID-19 gripped the world, instructions about what to do were locked down themselves. Trapped in pages and pages of dense legalese public health guidance. In PDFs. Having Google trawl through it was not enough to provide understanding.
As businesses began to reopen, confusion became a matter of life and death. But in public health, clarity and trust are the levers we have to wield. In this session, I will recount how San Francisco has (so far, as of October 2020!) avoided surges of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths with the help of information architecture.
By bringing clarity and trust into the equation, IA helped save tens of thousands of lives. What more can IA do, if we allow it to flourish out in the wider world?