Comic
Based on the reflection of Intervention 3, I decided to think outside the box. I created a virtual character, Cherry, and tried to convey a message to people by telling Cherry’s story and representing it in the form of serialized comics.
Why I choose Comic
Social media such as TikTok and Redbook convey information in the form of videos and pictures, so comics and animated characters are more suitable for dissemination of information on social media than text. At the same time, comics are more interesting and engaging.The shorter reading time is also an advantage of comic.
Problem
How can comics be fully utilized? How can comics be interacted with stakeholder and get feeback?
Find ally
I tried to contact the elderly community service center in Qingdao, my hometown, and learned that they regularly hold activities for the elderly in the nearby community, such as measuring high blood pressure, health knowledge lectures. After discussion, we agreed to hold a small lecture together at the community service center on 9th November.
Event detail
- 2nd November：Put up posters( include where and when, also ask people who want to participate to bring pharmaceutical products they bought on social media)
- 9th November: The whole event was attended by 12 elderly people, bringing a total of 25 bottles of pharmaceutical products which they bought on social media before, and 23 people watched online.
- knowledge popularization(comic)
- instructions explanation by doctor
- Interactive part: If you think today’s workshop will be useful to you and you find these pharmaceutical products that you brought are useless, please leave them when you leave.(in total 14)
- guidebook which includes the main content of today’s explanation and relevant cases can be taken away.
I found that the names of the main ingredients of the pharmaceutical products shown in most of the instructions are complex chemical names rather than well-known names. For example, water is a substance called dihydrogen monoxide in the instructions, but such a complex chemical name is not well known to most elderly people, which leads many of them are misled when purchasing. This is a new discovery and a new direction for my future project development.
Potential thoughts
The 14 bottles of pharmaceutical products that were left represent the recognition of this event by these participants, which also gave me a lot of confidence. In the future, I will make these 14 bottles of products into recycling bins, hoping that it can be used as a symbol to attract more target stakeholders to learn about relevant knowledge and even participate in later activities.
Reflection
This intervention broke the way I communicated with the participants through the Internet in my previous interventions, so that I was able to capture the participants’ behaviors more directly, so as to have a deeper experience.
Challenge
It was the first time I had worked directly with a community service center, and it was actually a challenge for me. Unlike unit 2, where I worked with classmates at school, the staff I worked with this time were all experienced elderly community workers in China. Differences in age and style of doing things all caused us to have some problems in the process of cooperation.
This collaboration workshop is also the first time to use a combination of online and offline methods, so the camera placement is chaotic, resulting in sometimes I did not see the video picture clearly, only heard the sound, which is also very regrettable. But after this event, I have more experience, and I think it will be beneficial for me to hold future events.