Aguatemala
social impact design + branding + web design + print material
Project Resound is a social design organization that was founded by my former professor on the belief that artists and designers are called to promote beauty, love and justice in the world. I joined Project Resound in the Spring of 2015.
During August 25th–28th of 2015 we partnered with professors and students at the Universidad del Istmo (UNIS) in Guatemala to complete a social design project for the municipality of Fraijanes, which is near Guatemala City. Twenty-five creatives collaborated in the creation of a potable water awareness campaign that included the design of a brand identity and educational materials aimed at elementary school age children—and vicariously to their parents. I participated as a senior graphic designer.
One of the biggest constraints of the project was time. We only had one week to do everything from research to final presentation. Pictured below are photos from our tour of Fraijanes and the water treatment facility that served them.
Through research, we discovered that many of the adults from the municipality were not educated or lacked the means to access the proper resources. This presented the challenge of spreading our message in a way that would be useful to the community. We were fortunate enough to visit a local school, which many of the children attended. Spending time with them gave us a brilliant idea! We could use the school kids as a vehicle to effectively disseminate our message.
Many of the kids liked cartoon characters and comic books. So, we thought there’d be no better way to reach them than with a new character that grabs their attention. Thus, Aguatemala was born! It was the perfect meaningful name because it’s a combination of Agua (water) and Guatemala.
We made sure to only design material that can be reasonably produced by either the school or the city officials who we made the final presentation to. Resources and production were always at the forefront of our minds. We designed a series of posters, apparel, boxed water containers, a website concept, buttons, paper cups and educational workbooks for the students & teachers.
Two of the more important things we developed were the teacher guidebook and student workbook. They included lessons and activities aimed at teaching the importance of smart water usage. One issue that we ran into was making sure we had ink to print examples of some of the things we designed. That made us think more about who’d be using these materials. Since there were way more students than teachers, it made sense to design the student workbooks in black and white. The teacher guidebooks are in color. This could possibly help to cut printing costs in the future.
Below the image there are .PDF links to the guidebook and workbook.
There were quite a few restraints that we had to work within. As I noted before, we were only there for a single week. Having a dedicated workspace wasn’t the case every day. The university gifted us with a room to use since we were working with some of their students. However, we weren’t able to make it to their campus everyday. At the time, Guatemala was having a very serious political crisis. I vividly remember soldiers with huge machine guns posted all over Guatemala City. Early Wednesday morning, we were strongly advised to not leave our hotel because there could danger and riots at any moment. So, of course we heeded that advice and worked from the hotel.
Pictured below are a few photos from some of our work sessions. The group was very collaborative and multidisciplinary. We had people from graphic design, photography/video, service design, web design and marketing, among others. All of the students were undergraduate. I was the only grad student, which is why I took the role of a senior designer. A few of us had laptops, but the most important tools, by far, were the white board, projector and sticky notes.
This is a video summarizing and encapsulating our time in Guatemala.