Changing perspectives through shared experiences
CASE
Context
MS cannot be discerned from an outside perspective. It causes suffering for patients and is expensive for the society. The solution is early treatment, but politicians need to allocate more resources and the health care system needs to attain more awareness on MS.
Challenge
How do you make an invisible disease tangible? Raising awareness of MS requires more than statistics – it needs emotional engagement. Politicians and healthcare providers must be compelled to act, but the most powerful advocates are the patients and their families. The challenge was to create a tool that could ignite conversation, foster empathy, and empower advocacy.
Solution
In a digital world the physical attribute is king. iMS is a 3D printed shoe that simulates MS through two symptoms. Fatigue – the sole is filled with lead weights that account for 4% of the user’s weight. Imbalance – the sole is uneven and rounded. To tell the story about the shoe while also striking an emotional chord, we created a film that was highly recognizable to the target audience. It portrayed Susanne, who suffers from MS, and her best friend Malin who walked a day in Susanne’s shoes. Data visualizations illustrated how wearing the iMS shoe affected Malin. Meanwhile, a microsite presented information about the shoe, the symptoms and the costs of MS in Sweden, to help build our argument.
Impact
The iMS shoe received media praise and our message got eight minutes of airtime on primetime morning TV. The campaign films have been viewed more than 420,000 times and shared over 1,300 times. Politicians, patients and their families celebrated the campaign on social media. But most importantly, the message got through. Decision makers and healthcare professionals are now using the shoe as part of a national tour to spark change within Sweden’s MS care.
