Sandwich Shop — Antidote: Design, Interaction, and Play for Complex Issues

💩 Sandwich Shop

How can we talk about critical issues that are socially taboo?

Playful Workshop for Wash United

Wash United needed to talk to people in professional settings about poop. They had to quickly impart the necessity of their work to people who may feel uncomfortable discussing it at public events.

Wash United is a nonprofit that focuses on cleanliness and sanitation. They run multiple outreach campaigns getting more people aware of the necessity of hand washing and building cleaner toilets throughout the world. While they had no problem reaching their constituents, they couldn’t figure out how to impart the urgency of the problem to people in countries who did have adequate access to toilets.

Working with Wash, Antidote set out to understand the spaces and people they needed to reach. Finding the perfect balance of humor, play, and systemic communication was a delicate issue. We also wanted to illustrate the feeling of shame that sometimes comes when you have no access to toilets.

Through a series of user tests at Parsons School for Design and SVA School for Social Innovation, we created an interactive session about making sandwiches. But the result of eating sandwiches is poop, and with no where to dispose it, players threw it on the ground.

At the end of a session when a winner was announced, there was poop everywhere, giving players an immediate visual reference and personal experience of the issue of public defecation.

Sandwich Shop was invited to be featured at the 2014 Games for Change festival.

How can we talk about critical issues that are socially taboo?

Wash United needed to talk to people in professional settings about poop. They had to quickly impart the necessity of their work to people who may feel uncomfortable discussing it at public events.

Through a series of user tests at Parsons School for Design and SVA School for Social Innovation, we created an interactive session about making sandwiches. But the result of eating sandwiches is poop, and with no where to dispose it, players threw it on the ground.

At the end of a session when a winner was announced, there was poop everywhere, giving players an immediate visual reference and personal experience of the issue of public defecation.

Sandwich Shop was invited to be featured at the 2014 Games for Change festival.

Officers of Otago

Quest for Kailas

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