The Brief
How can you move people to really understand Alzheimer’s Disease, see the life-saving importance of drug development, and motivate them to donate?
The Solution
Bring a dementia research lab to life. Help people understand through interaction. Pack an emotional punch by personalising the experience.
Background
With an increasingly ageing population, the number of people living with dementia is expected to hit a million by 2021. In 2012 alone, newspaper headlines featuring the word ‘dementia’ increased by 170%. However, despite the best efforts of research charities and scientists to keep the conversation factual, media coverage of medical research was plagued by inaccuracy and misrepresentation. The public remained concerned that science takes place behind closed doors and they don’t understand how scientists go about their work.
In their brief, Alzheimer’s Research UK communicated about the lack of tools available to engage the public in learning about the different stages of medical research. While there are several short leaflets available, there is no interactive educational tool that takes people through the entire research process.
Our Approach
We developed the Lab, an experiential site that takes users on a journey through the drug development process. The Lab opens with an emotive question: “What if you couldn’t remember your family and friends?”. The challenge then was how to create informative and interactive content that was bold enough to get people talking and practical enough to drive donations.
Users can see a personalised photo album filled with pictures imported from their social channels – of their own friends & family, which slowly fade away, mimicking the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s. In experiencing this our aim was to make it relevant and help reinforces the need to invest in research.
Users are then invited to journey through the drug research, development and clinical trial process via an innovative interface that immerses you deep inside the lab environment. The piece ends with a call to action to donate and find our more about how they can help. The Lab gained national press coverage and won the Association of Medical Research Charities’ Science Communication Award.
Tilt created a sleek and engaging website, which really brought our ideas to life. Their creative thinking presented us with ideas and functionality beyond our expectations that worked superbly in making The Lab a captivating and immersive experience for all our visitors.
LAURA PHIPPS SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER