British Interactive Media Association:

Smart scoops major innovation awards for global health initiative

Press

At last week’s BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) Awards ceremony, Smart Design was recognized with one of the design industry’s most prestigious accolades, the Advance Award for Innovation for our work with startup Simprints. The honor is bestowed upon one recipient from all the innovation category award winners, recognizing exceptional digital work that pushes the limits across innovation, craft and impact. Earlier in the evening, Smart was also revealed as the winner for the Product & Service Design: Innovation category, a prelude to the Advance Award.

Smart Design supported Simprints in designing a seamless patient identification experience that bridges the gap for underserved populations in the developing world – estimated at more than 2 billion people. Simprints initially developed a portable biometric scanner that empowers community healthcare workers to digitally link a person’s fingerprints to their medical records. Enter Smart, who ensured that each medical interaction using this technology is a meaningful and impactful experience at the frontline of maternal healthcare. Included in our approach was building design capability in the Simprints’ team, training staff on a wide range of new design research tools, protocols and techniques, now being implemented globally towards the crucial ongoing tracking of patients, and lasting outcomes.

These awards are hot on the heels of our senior strategist Ruby Steel being selected as a BIMA Hot 100 digital trailblazer, recognizing individual excellence her recent contribution in driving design innovation and excellence, as featured on BBC2’s TV show The Big Life Fix.

Our collaboration with Simprints also recently featured as Core77’s Design for Social Impact Award winner, and as a finalist in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards. With $2 million in recently acquired funding to launch their innovations, Smart Design is preparing to further help Simprints scale up their solution in the coming months.

Click here to view the full list of this year’s BIMA winners, one of the most esteemed and longest standing awards programs in the UK.

Sep 2017