Taproot

group project •  10 weeks • Umeå Institute of Design

A proposal on how to integrate herbal medicine in the health system
and make it safe and accessible for more people.

Group

Emil Guldager
& me

Methods

Co-creation, Ethnographic KIt Design for all life

My Role

Ideation, Storyboarding, Projectplanning, Filmmaking, Animation

Concept

Taproot is a combination of three main parts: the Herbiary, the Sprouts, and the Taproot App. The Sprouts offer fresh local herbs and plants that can be collected and used to treat various diseases, while the Herbiary provides a larger collection of herbal medicine in different forms. The app allows the patient to connect to a professional herbotherapist, which is a new profession in the near future that is a mixture of a naturopathic doctor and a therapist. Together, they can make a recovery plan, where progress can be tracked and updated through the app. The app then guides the patient to the relevant herb station along with recipes on dosage and usage for treatment.

Sprouts

Sprouts are decentralized herb stations spread around the city growing fresh herbs up for grabs. The herbs available at the Sprouts are safe-to-use herbs. The Sprouts are made intuitively distinguishable by splitting them into the same categories as in the app, each station having a unique focus such as ‘Mind’ or ‘Women’s Health’. To avoid them taking up unnecessary space, they are integrated into the existing green urban space.

Herbiary

Herbiaries are larger, staffed locations that can provide stronger herbs in different forms, such as pills or drops, if you have a prescription from your herbotherapist. The professional medical staff can also help you with correct dosage and usage, and guide you to specific plants to help remedy your condition.

Taproot App

The app connects the patient with the Herbiary, the Sprouts, and their herbotherapist. It enables the patient to scan and get information about the different herbs along with recipes on different ways to medicate. It connects the patient and the herbotherapist by allowing them to make recovery plans together and have initial or follow-up video consultations while visualizing the progress of the plan. Lastly, the explore section lets the patient discover what stations or herbs are nearby as well as which plants can help remedy a specific disease.

Future User Journey

This video shows an example of a plausible future user journey with Taproot. The journey is based on a user named Lærke, who struggles with anxiety attacks, causing insomnia. The video illustrates what could be a typical use-case of her using Taproot and herbal medicine to help relieve the anxiety attacks.

Process

The project was split up into three different phases each with a unique focus. We have put together three handy videos corresponding to each phase to showcase our approach to the different phases and the insights and outcomes we gathered from them.

Phase 1: Design Ethnography

In the first phase, we describe how we started off by connecting with a group of young doctors from Cologne to explore current and future challenges, and how we ended up conducting an exploration workshop with them.

Phase 2: Participatory Design

In the second phase, we describe how we engaged with the individual doctors and conducted co-create sessions with them to get initial concept directions along with how we included patients in the process.

Phase 3: Design Development

In the third phase, we describe how we conducted several ideation workshops to help generate and iterate on ideas and how we included a professional biologist to ensure a certain level of implementation and applicability in our concept.

Ideation workshop

Here is our Ideation Workshop from the Design Development phase.
If you woudl like to download the PDF you can do it here.

Remote Design Guide

During this project we collected all the methods we used and documented how we applied them in a remote setting.