Estonian ePolice Query System

What The Block is a project which is all about engaging people through design to learn and discover the potential of new technologies. We started out with Blockchain, since designers working with Blockchain, we had been inundated with requests from colleagues, peers, clients, family, and friends to explain Blockchain – the problem was we couldn’t find any good existing material out there.

In 2013 I attended a concert where I lost some of my high-frequency hearing and gained tinnitus due to an acoustic trauma. It completely changed the way I experienced the world and sound; as a former classical singer, that was a big shift. But as I adapted to my new sensory perception, I came to know music’s power anew, wonder how others experienced sound differently than I, and how this force could be used for healing. This curiosity eventually lead me to the music therapists and deaf and hearing-impaired patients of Elizabeth Seton Children’s.

Government Digital Service (GDS) of the United Kingdom is honored for its exemplary culture change through design. Through openly communicating about and sharing their work, they provide an inspiring model for the U.S., Australia, and others.

The Colour of Resilience is a physical and interactive exhibit launched at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January 2023. It’s the first art project in history to have teams of refugee teaching artists painting canvas murals in four different refugee camps and displaced communities across four continents. Teaching artists painted with displaced communities and children to tell the stories of where they came from, how they got to where they are, and what they dream of for the future.

When we discuss problems in policing, we rarely indict the records management software. There’s a common misconception that police are “high tech” when, in reality, 20% of departments are still using paper reports to file incidents. The rest are using outdated software that makes it impossible to share crime information across city lines. Problematic software has even resulted in criminals walking free based on technicalities like arrests not being processed in time. This was a decades old problem that no one else bothered to fix despite hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars being spent each year on it. With Cobalt Records Management System, the team at Mark43 redesigned police reporting workflows from the ground up, and built a user experience that officers could finally embrace instead of complain about.

Behind the glamour and entertainment of live events there is always a production crew working fast to manage multiple people and data points in an often linear and disconnected environment. Seeing the big picture is difficult, and a lot of hours of manual labor are required to keep track of everything. Balls get dropped, errors get made, and work that needs to be accurate, fast, and on time, eventually turns into a debacle.

There are currently over 65 million people displaced worldwide, the highest number since World War II. Last year the UN’s migration body, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) attended to the welfare of over 5.2 million people. Although access to healthcare is a basic human right, the growing number of refugees and migrants is making it increasingly difficult to provide support on the ground. Inspired by the on-going European refugee crisis, Frontend volunteered to work with IOM to review their service provisioning and design a “Future Vision for Migrant Healthcare”. Reimaging medication labelling is a central part of this project.

SWYP (See What You Print) radically simplifies printing by giving you the ability to see and manipulate, in a 1:1 scale, what the finished result will look like before you print. The underlying idea is that many common problems, including the wasting of time and paper, could be fixed by making all aspects of the printing interaction more natural, predictable and understandable.

We Remember invites visitors to tell their 9/11 stories as part of the permanent collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Visitors to the site enter a sound-proof booth, locate themselves on a world map and record and contribute their stories for use in the introductory exhibition of the permanent museum opening in 2012. These stories are also used to make the Explore 9/11 iPhone application, a mobile guide that features a seven stop walking tour of the area around the World Trade Center, accompanied by audio and photo narration, as well as an augmented reality mode in which photos from the site overlay the phone’s current camera view.

Recent political events have highlighted a deep disconnect between society and government. Internationally, people have taken to the streets to protest, or used their vote at the ballot box to voice their dissatisfaction with ‘the establishment’. The problem facing policymakers is no less challenging – with the breakdown of traditional media and the rise of ‘fake-news’, it’s harder than ever to communicate effectively with citizens resulting in a breakdown in civic dialogue and an erosion of trust in our public institutions.