Asian Development Bank

Human Centered Design

The scrapbook

About the client

Conceived in the 1960s, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) are a financial institution who foster economic growth and cooperation. Beginning with focuses such as food production, today the ADB are developing an intelligent transport system built around the principles of human-centred design and sustainable infrastructure. The ADB came to us to create a film sharing the vision behind their new project with their staff.

The challenge

When bringing the vision of the ADB to the life our challenge was to present several quite different elements of human-centered design in ways which were informative but also tied them into the wider concept. We had to make the film informative, inspirational and engaging for a primary audience of internal staff while making it accessible to other organisations and the public. Following the preferences of the ADB, we avoided using number-based facts and stats. This put an emphasis on what the whiteboard style was made for, using strong scripts and visual language to tell a captivating story.

The film

Human-centered design gives people a voice and allows designers of important social constructions like cities to make them better for their inhabitants. In the film, the ADB explain the design and development of the new Chinese district Gui’an.

Using a positive and inspirational tone, we told the story of Gui’an district and the human-centred design that is creating it. This tone was created through a combination of upbeat voiceover and script, optimistic background music, vibrant green accent colour and charming illustration. Together these delivered an uplifting and hopeful narrative which viewers could relate to and feel inspired by. Illustrations such as passengers inside a bus and a group of school girls going to a hackathon brought the narrative to life while the scenes like the bus stop scene embodied the technical applications of human centered design. Careful framing and animation tied the scenes together and guided the view at steady focused pace. The whiteboard animation style came into its own describing concepts such as ‘intelligent transport systems’. Not only did the visual representation of this concept reinforce the voiceover, but by constructing it from visual components drawn from travel we were able to emphasise it even further.

The end result was a highly engaging and hopeful film that presented a clear vision of Gui’an District and the principle of human centred design that has gone into it.

The context

You can find a full overview of the ADB’s plans for the Gui’an District here.