The greatest adventure of the year continues as the two young Rice students press forward through each obstacle arising on the treacherous path. Facing for hours a desk fraught with work, the endless piercing clacks of fingernails on keys, typing earnest reports calling for aid from Houston allies unaware of the toils of their sisters…
Between our mornings and afternoons at our combined desk this week, I’ve been accompanying Whitney on her first go through the Lord of the Rings movies. This week has been much more mentally than physically tasking, inspiring movie time during our lunch breaks. There have been less meetings and field trips, and many more hours working on our projects from the desk. This doesn’t sound like a lot when I write it, but we’ve each made a good deal of progress on our projects, and I’ve enjoyed the work I’ve been doing.
To refresh, I am working with AME (the ambulatory medical specialists building) on two projects to make educational materials for patients with hypertension. The first project is a daily diet tracker that does not require literacy or numeracy to use. It has become a physical prototype with the help of what I’ve been calling “The Paper Room.” This is a mysterious room with the generic label, “Residência,” on the door through which 4 people work. One of them has been extremely helpful printing, cutting, and laminating my equally mysterious scraps of paper without question while the others look on with faint interest. I like this relationship very much. The diet tracker is meant to count servings of each food group ingested per day. The serving size is designated by hand sizes (meat with a fist, vegetables with two cupped hands, fats with a thumb, etc.), and the “bad” foods are cautioned against with red and yellow X’s. I thought about not including these “bad” foods at all, but the colleagues at AME and I agreed it was unrealistic to assume users wouldn’t cheat, so we may as well encourage portion control while the cheating occurs.
If a patient were using this diet tracker, they would be warned with the yellow X to slow down on the bread after so many servings. The tabs on this prototype stay in place pretty well when no one is pulling on them intentionally.
The second project is the poster that will be used by health care workers during AME’s Hypertension D-Days. A D-Day is a day in which AME specialists travel to a primary care clinic to see patients that all share the same morbidity, training physicians to determine whether secondary care is necessary along the way. The poster is modeled after a similar diabetes poster of AME’s, and in this week it has gone from hand drawn sketch to a colorful illustration made with PhotoScape X. I started the week with water color prints to decide what style I wanted to make my cartoon men, and I found a lot of value in practicing until I had a method for quickly making the characters. This has taken most of my working hours this week.
The poster I showed AME initially, including the notes written on it during our meeting.
Practicing my tiny, terrified, hypertensive characters with water color, colored pencils, and markers.
The poster as it is now, made on PhotoScape X with a combination of the program’s paint tool and stock photos. I imported the sketch above as a photograph, resized it, and used it as a template over which I made the illustrations.
On Monday, I will get to meet with AME again to get more feedback so that next week can be spent making revisions. I already have a list of small things I want to change in constructing the diet tracker, but instead of making these updates today, I want to use the self criticism as a way of inviting the very polite AME workers to tear into my prototype with everything they can think of. As for the poster, since AME already added the content they wanted to see with the sketched version, I expect most of the criticism will be aesthetic. To prepare for this, I have preemptively started researching other illustration programs, since I suspect there is not much more I can do aesthetically with the program I am using. This work has been a lot of fun, and I never thought in my time at Rice I would get to spend a week on art projects that could actually be helpful in a medical setting. It’s comforting to know that work valued by others can still be fun, especially as my graduation from Rice approaches this December and I apply for jobs and graduate schools. As Gandalf said, “All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”