India’s premier design institute, NID, comes up with innovative way to encourage blood donations.
Are you a blood donor? If not, the students of National Institute of Design (NID) might tempt you to become one soon.
In an attempt to attract more blood donors, students of NID have come up with an innovative idea of creating an entirely new ambience where the donors feel like they are in a health spa rather than at a blood donation camp.
With cucumber slices placed above the eyes of the donor, flower petals floating on the water and scented candles all around, the students have organised two such blood camps on the institute's campus and are now continuing with their research through the responses received from the donors.
The novel method is a part of an academic project of a group of students of product design at NID which looks into the large gap of the requirement of blood for patients and the amount of donation made by the people in the country.
The group which includes Subash Chellamuthu, Ankit Vyas and Manjari Choudhary, is trying to plug the leaking hole in the entire system.
In their initial research, the students came across several responses on why people shy away from blood donations. After analysing these responses, they started planning a new system design of the blood donation camps.
Vyas said, "Creating a health spa-like ambience is a part of the new system and aims to create a refreshing and memorable experience for the donors so that people are not only attracted to donate blood but continue doing it."
The students learned from their study, that until there is a requirement for blood replacement that they know of, people usually do not donate voluntarily.
Many get confused by dilemmas like, are they fit enough? Will it affect his/her health? Also, the donor doesn't get a memorable experience of donating blood.
The students are also designing a mobile blood bank system to cater to the primary health centres in the rural areas.
Talking about the need and importance of the project, Chellamuthu said, "There is a huge gap between need for blood and safe blood availability. Four crores units of blood are required every year in India but we hardly get 40 lakh units, which is just 10 % of the whole requirement.
At the same time there are so many people in the society who want to donate but keep waiting for a right opportunity. So, there must be so many loopholes in the whole system. We are trying to improve matters by redesigning the system and creating an experience of donation through design."
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