Global Health Check

We let people to explore the state of the world’s health through an interactive, personalised experience at London’s Science Museum.
Client

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

A photo taken during the Global Health Check presentation. It shows a group of people looking at two television screens on stands both displaying different parts of the Global Health Check interactive.

Has the world become sicker or stronger since you were born?

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked us to develop a multi-platform visualization to launch at ‘Contagion’, an event hosted at the London Science Museum. It would explain how global health has changed over time and raise awareness for ongoing health challenges.

This was a story about the whole world, but we placed users at the core of it. Using data going back over 100 years, we let people input their date of birth and see how much progress has been made in their lifetimes.

These visualizations had a lifetime of their own, first appearing at the Lates night at the Science Museum and then online at mosaicscience.com. This meant finding visual devices that worked whether they were on a phone or an exhibition screen.

We placed our global health stories against other recognisable moments in history. What’s happened since the Beatles recorded ‘ Let it Be’? Or since Neil Armstrong left his footprints on the moon?

Our team was there on the night to see people enjoy the exhibition first hand. Global Health Check was also shortlisted in the Information is Beautiful awards and received an honouree Webby for Best Health Website.

A series of sketches planning out visualizations for the Global Health Check presentation and website.
A side-by-side of an initial sketch and final visualization that shows a proportional area chart comparing how diarrhoea deaths have changed between when a person was born and the present day.
A screenshot of a Global Health Check visualization that shows if all the healthy life lost on Earth due to illnesses wash shared equally among everyone, how much the user would have lost in their life.
A scatter plot of major pandemics where the points represent the end of an outbreak and lines connect them back to the begining of each pandemic on the x-axis which spans 1915 to the present day. It shows that the Spanish flu which began in 1918 was the deadliest pandemic in history with around 45,000,000 deaths in just two years.
A timeline showing the dates of the four flu pandemics that have ocurred since the First World War ended. They occurred in 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009.
A graphic with the heading 'When The Beatles first sand 'When I'm 64', just 1 in 5 babies could expect to reach their 60th birthday.' Below this text are five birthday cakes with one slightly faded. At the bottom is the text 'Now 4 in 5 can.''
A photo taken at the Global Health Check physical installation. Various screens show the final visualizations as people look and interact with each one around the room.

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