We are working toward an accreditation, and I keep thinking about how a communication problem quietly turned into a design problem.
Accreditation is not a formality in a hospital. Without it the place does not function. Every department has to know what is expected, what has changed, and what to do differently, and they have to know it now, across every site, at the same time.
The old way to tell them was a memo on a bulletin board. Printed, pinned, and walked straight past. I don't blame anyone for that; it is what we had. But a sheet of paper on a corkboard in a corridor at the Grey Nuns is not really communication. It is closer to hope.
So we piloted something. Screens — digital signage, standing where people actually stand, running content we make ourselves. I have been building the videos in After Effects, and we have been assembling our own way to push them out to televisions across the organisation, to hospitals scattered right across the province.
What I keep turning over is that this is not a flourish. If the message reaches the people who need it, the accreditation goes through, and the hospital carries on doing what a hospital does. That is a short line from a piece of motion graphics to a place that keeps working, and I don't think I have felt the weight of a deliverable quite like it.
Maybe the useful thing here was not making anything prettier. It was noticing that the channel itself was broken, and going to build a better one.