Art & Design Students Produce New Universal Healthcare Symbols
Art & Design students, advised by assistant professor Kathryn McCormick, will have their work featured in various hospitals and health care facilities around the country.
The Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) and Hablamos Juntos, an organization that develops solutions to language barriers in health care, recently unveiled new Universal Symbols in Health Care, many of which were designed by College of Liberal Arts’ Art & Design students. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the project through their Pioneer Portfolio grant.
After an initial application process, McCormick and her team were selected as one of four schools to form a design consortium in collaboration with Hablamos Juntos. The goals of the consortium included continuing development of previously designed symbols and the creation of eighteen new symbols. The students then researched, created new designs plus modified the existing symbols that were then submitted for evaluation for cross-cultural effectiveness. Besides Cal Poly, other universities who participated in the consortium are University of Cincinnati, Iowa State University and Kent State University.
The winning designs will soon be introduced at four partnering healthcare facilities: Women & Infants Hospital Providence, RI; Seattle’s International Community Health Services; Kansas City’s Children’s Mercy Hospital; and Atlanta’s Grady Health System.
The CLA students who participated are Tierney Cunningham (Art ‘10), Jacklyn DeMartini (Art), John Dixon (Art ‘10), Scott Ender (Art ‘10), Helen Feldman (Art ‘10), Sara Hamling (Art ‘10), Dante Iniguez (Art ‘10), Keiko Komada (Art ‘10), Douglas Meyer (Art ‘10), Rachell Newburn (Art), Xander Pollock (Art ‘10), Justin Rodriguez (Art ‘10), Andrew Santos-Johnson (Art ‘10), Melissa Titus (Art ‘10), Quyen Trie (Art ‘10),, Mai-Chi Vu (Art ‘10), and Adam Wirdak (Art ‘10).
All participating students enrolled in one or more of McCormick’s ART 470 classes, which were offered in past spring and fall quarters at Cal Poly.