health

It’s a design emergency. Road trauma is the number one cause of death and injury for children in every country of the world. And crashes disproportionately affect the poor with 9 out of 10 deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries.

While the engineers huddle over traffic and urban planning, there’s one monster big enough for the educational front.

Your lovable pal Grover has taken on the role of Global Road Safety Ambassador in support of the United Nations’s Decade of Action for Road Safety.

Ambassador Grover stars in a series of PSA’s developed by Sesame Workshop and the Global Road Safety Partnership to accompany a Road Safety Education Framework for educators, parents, and communities.

Inspired by the success of the red ribbon for HIV/AIDS and the white band against global poverty, the Decade of Action group is also promoting a yellow Road Safety Tag to increase awareness of the issue. Sports figures, celebrities, and politicians have been spotted wearing the tag.

Poster design by Chaz Maviyane-Davies for World AIDS Day.

This summer Artists Nicole Schulman and Tanya Albrigtsen-Frable worked with 15 young women, ages 14-18 in the in the Groundswell Community Mural Project Voices Her’d program to design a series of 8 posters for the organization Day One to educate young people about intimate partner violence in teen relationships, and how to get help if you are in an abusive relationship. You can see the posters online here and they will be available in print from Day One.

Nicole notes: “I am particularly proud of this project, the young women really took the lead, bottom lining all the designs, and completing them using traditional drawing, as well as Photoshop and Illustrator (which most had to learn).”

A blog set up by the teens shows the final designs, as well as their feedback, reflections and photos of the process.

To commemorate 100 years of public health STD programs, the City Clinic of San Francisco has posted 100 posters on STD prevention. The images lack attribution and date, but the spectrum visual strategies and messages is fantastic.

I thought this one was particularly effective, both earnest and ironic, packing humor and fear in an urgent and familiar retro package:

To really catch all the zingers, click through for an, um, larger version.

Update 7/11/11. Mike wrote in to ID the poster above: it was designed by Art Chantry in 1993. There’s a bit more info on it here.

It’s also one of the 150 images in this exhibition of 25 years of international AIDS awareness posters. Some highlights are up at Design Observer.

Last month, GOOD posted this write-up about an increasing number of graduate design programs focused design for social impact. There’s more to say on this, but in the meantime, no need to wait for grad school — why not start a student-run Design for America studio on your own campus? DfA’s previous projects focus on childhood diabetes, hospital-acquired infections, cafeteria water conservation, and children with post-war stress.