Story Map
A New Path to Follow in Health Design
The project began with meeting our co-designers living at the Banfield Pavilion long-term care home for people living with dementia. The goal of my group was to create something that allows residents to share their culture with others as a way to increase social interactions and build relationships with Banfield staff, residents and other visitors.
Story maps are an easy way for people to visualize events, characters and settings by making communication simpler through improved understanding of the concepts being told while supporting a environment for enhanced learning and memory. These maps also encourage critical thinking by allowing viewers to navigate the stories on their own and question what they are seeing to create a more engaging interaction.
Through the discussions with our co-creating residents, my group discovered that both had a deep history of boating along the west coast of British Columbia. To explore these stories, I created cards with icons to help spur old memories with the aim of helping our residents recall moments in their lives which they would like to share with the world.
To begin visualizing the approximate layout and size of the map, I created a 1:1 mockup of Vancouver island and the west coast using paper cutouts to represent the many layers and features of the land.
The layers of this map were first drawn using a combination of Adobe Illustrators vector tools for the base land layer, with the remaining layers drawn by hand.
The map was created using seven cut-layers representing the sea, land and mountains. The sea layers were first attached with epoxy and painted with a magnetic paint to alow our 3D printed boats to stick while mounted upright. These layers were then painted sea blue and the remaining pieces were first sprayed with a clear coating to protect it from accidental spills or damage while in use. Once dried, the additional land and mountain layers were attached along with the icons representing each story.
Topographical wood map, laser cut Balsa wood, 7-layers, magnetic paint, 23x16.5”
