The challenge I was recently involved in a non-for-proﬁt project to build awareness about ‘breast density and its  relationship with breast cancer’. Breast density has been identiﬁed to be the number one factor for  developing breast cancer. In Australia, it is a fairly new condition agreed upon the medical  community to be important. Therefore, there are not solid procedures on how to notify women or  even if is important to do so. This project, Breast Density Australia, seek to provide society with  reliable and trustworthy resources that would inform, primarily women and medical practitioners,  everything there is to know about breast density and potentially accelerate the creation of effective  processes to screen women at a higher risk of developing breast cancer. The challenge was to ﬁnd  a way to inform women without creating panic or a sentiment of medical negligence for doctors not  informing them earlier and to engage with doctors to join the initiative without sounding  condescending or generating a sense of attack.

Tool selected: Visualisation The complexity of this task required the team to understand at a large scale all the agents involved  and the procedures to screen breast cancer in Australia. Essentially, we needed to ﬁnd the most  effective way to get the message out and deﬁne the ultimate goal of the initiative.

A good tool to explore and recognise the environment that we were dealing with was: Visualisation.  As explained in the video with Angela Myer, visualisation as a tool can be very powerful in all  different stages of the design process. From exploration to pattern ﬁnding to sketching and  prototyping, visualisation plays an essential role in the design development.  I decided to use  visualisation because I saw it as an effective tool to start capturing all the information that we knew  at the time and potentially identify patterns in sentiment among all the 'personas', speciﬁc  challenges that we would face, as well as opportunities to ﬁnd the right channels to communicate  our message.

It was also a tool that would help us structure what we knew and what we needed to learn or  research. In addition, the team didn’t know each other or worked together before therefore,  visualisation was the perfect medium to integrate the team in a freely way.

Application: Post-it  I decided that the best way to apply this tool was using post-its. This way I could get the team to  participate equally regardless of their drawing skills.

We started by writing down all the possible institutions/people involved in the breast cancer  community in Australia. Then we post them on the wall and created visual columns. We used  different colors depending on the row or purpose of the post it, that helped us to build categories.  Underneath the ﬁrst group of post-its, we added things we thought we would like to get from each  group. For example, Breast Screening Australia = Support spreading the message, potentially use  their database. We also identiﬁed challenges to engage with each one of the groups (eg. fears,  pain points, regulations, etc). [See image 1,2 attached] Something we didn’t plan but came out from the session was potential allies and sponsors, which  considering we didn’t have much money was a huge opportunity.

Insights The post-its method helped us built in a visual way the entire ecosystem of the challenge we were  facing. It helped us to identify patterns and similarities in the approach we needed to take with the  different institutions. Additionally, we were able to prioritise tasks and determine who would do  what next. More importantly, this visualisation activity, helped us to see clearly where the problem  was and how we should start building a strategy to solve it. It was extremely effective and brought  the team together. Before the session, the challenge seemed almost impossible and to be honest quite scary.  Confronting the medical community and scaring women were shared fears that we all had.  However, after this activity, everyone felt quite positive and the task didn’t seem that impossible

anymore. I think it opened up our minds and simpliﬁed the pathways to achieve our goals. It  literally changed our thinking.

Approach I think next time it would be good to do it on a whiteboard so in addition to the post-its we could  draw connectors and build better diagrams. I think some of the links and ﬂows founded were a bit  lost after the session because we didn’t connect them visually at the time and by the time we  transferred into a powerpoint slide some of the ﬁndings were lost or forgotten.

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