ReadyID
DESIGNING FOR PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN DISASTERS
Partners: FEMA (Federal Emergency Management)
Team: Juyeon Lee & Rachel Murray
2015, NY
How might we make it easier to share personally identifiable information in a disaster, for citizens to receive and share resources, and aid workers to give resources and information?
Your personal information is one of the most valuable things in your life. What happens to it in a disaster? The ‘ReadyID’ is a service design proposal aimed to assist citizens and aid workers before, during, and after a time of a disaster. The system aims to get formal and informal to work together. Our mission was to design a system that helps people reach the information they will need in a crisis and a platform for exchanging resources.
Challenge & Design Opportunity
Why being prepared for a crisis is not customary in our behavior?
How many people know their blood type? Know their significant other's phone number off by heart, or have it written down somewhere on paper? Knowing the correct information is something society wrestles with within times of disasters. The vast majority of society is not prepared for a time of crisis. Emergency preparedness isn't just about how much toilet paper or food we have when disaster strikes, but how information plays a role. We identified a need for a better kind of ID card for disasters through our process. Our service offers a two-way solution in an ecosystem of multiple communication methods and benefits for citizens, volunteers, and formal aid workers. We aren't just about creating new solutions or improving existing ones - we also try connecting those new and existing systems into better services.
Outcomes & Benefits
The 'ReadyID' is a systemic service that combines:
• The user - citizen's critical personal disaster information, e.g., specific meds.
• The user disaster resources and skills, e.g., CPR certificate
• A 'reverse safety check' to facilitate instant volunteers.
We envisioned this as a suite of products: The product contains a Website to help prepare people before the crisis by registering through the site and using a preparedness checklist.
A mobile app and a physical card, with a QR code and a key tag containing all the necessary personal info and potential recourses.
The kit is both digital and non-digital. You may not have all of the kits with you at all times, but chances are you'll have something among the digital and non-digital when the time in need arrive. Our service would:
• Connect individuals and communities in a disaster through an automatic volunteer system, using their everyday skills.
• Help aid workers with volunteering, reduce the time for providing citizens assistance, standardization for ID, and possibly aid agencies.
• Helped people know about their personal information - increasing awareness of personal information's importance in a disaster.
Methods & Strategy
Workshop Design & Facilitation: By designing and facilitating a workshop for a co-creation with crisis management experts, we used different design research methods such as personas, empathy, and business owner maps to ernest their knowledge into insights in searching for a user-centric design intervention. We used 3 personas – and asked: In a disaster, what's important to know about citizens seeking help to assist them best?
Synthesis & key finding to Define the problem space:
• TIME it takes time to enter the survivals info into the systems.
• SKILLS People may not realize they have skills that can be useful in disasters.
• INFORMATION: People don't know their information or are too stressed in disasters to remember it.
We asked ourselves: How might we make it easier to share personally identifiable information in a disaster? That led us to think about a better id, a Disaster ID
Prototype & Testing of the first ID card by showing them to people on the streets of NY
Iteration and Creation of our ReadyID system
Visualise the strategy through Customer Journey Map