The Current COVID-19 Vaccine Card is Terrible. We Asked Professional Designers to Create a Better Version

It’s hard to move through the modern world without carrying a full deck of personal cards with you: driver’s license, insurance card, credit cards, bank card, Medicare card, student ID card and more. They are the transactional visas of contemporary life and they’ve been designed with that role in mind—durable, portable, easy to use, hard to forge. The newest addition is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination card—and it violates almost every rule of good design: it’s made of perishable paper; it’s too big to fit in most wallets; it’s entirely analog—with small spaces for handwritten entries, which can be hard to read at best and entirely illegible at worst; it’s black and white and thus a cinch for forgers; it’s unencrypted—with information displayed on the face of the card rather than hidden in a QR or barcode—meaning that if you do misplace it, your health information is out in the world. What’s more, the card connects to no central database, making it impossible to link electronically with any of your other medical records. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “The CDC was required to move quickly and address many complexities,” says Sandy Speicher, the CEO of IDEO, a global design firm. “There’s a need for privacy, security and accuracy and there’s a need for people to understand what this card is for and how t...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news