During my Information Design course at Vancouver Film School I heard presentations from three potential clients. I chose to work with Micheal Vonn of the BC Civil Liberties Association to educate people about the British Columbia government's plan to consolidate their health care records.
While some consolidation can be helpful in the case of some very specific health emergencies the government's plan to share information with other ministries and the private contractors who work for them raised some serious red flags about control over who had access to your private information. If you mouse over the photographs below you can learn a bit about the process of creating All The Cards.
All The Cards is a video I created for the BC Civil Liberties Association.
The BC government's plan to combine and share data among various ministries and their outside contractors raises serious privacy concerns.
Since people seem quite willing to give away private information, the first challenge was to find an analogy that could show people that even though each piece of information may seem harmless, they form a picture of you when combined.
When I came up with the concept everyone thought I'd be motion tracking the cards and digitally compositing the startled face on the back of the cards. Or I could... I dunno... just glue a photo on the back of the playing cards!
Professor of Psychology Abraham Maslow once said "I suppose it is tempting if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were nail". It's only natural when you're learning new skills to want to use them...
..but I think many communicators tend to use certain techniques just because they can rather than determing if what they want to do is the best technique for that particular project.
I'd like to think that I don't do that.
When I show the government matching up different information using a process known as data mining and then pulling all the bits and pieces together there were some unexpected surprises that some designers like to call "happy accidents".
This shot with someone sticking their fingers in your eyes seemed to be one of those "happy accidents" that got people's attention and made them think. I don't know if the shot would have been as effective if done in the computer.
I like the simplicity of my concept and my execution of it. I also liked that I nailed the assignment without a "hammer".
As one of my classmates said sometimes old school is better.
Thanks in particular to Micheal Vonn of the BC Civil Liberties Association for bringing this issue to my attention.
