The ibuproject is an informal international, interdisciplinary cooperation. It seeks to develop tuqtuli instructions for a simple painkiller, Ibuprofen.
Ibuprofen is sold all over the world. But many people can’t read the package leaflet: illiterates, people who have difficulty reading or do not understand the language spoken around them.
The ibuproject is meant to be a pilot. We envision pictographic communication to become a norm on medicine instruction leaflets.
the core team
We, that is Karel (Belgium), Mandar (India), and Juli (Germany).
Dr. Karel van der Waarde is a Dutch national, living in Brussels, Belgium. He is a design and research consultant mainly in the medical-pharmaceutical sector. He teaches Visual Communication at the Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, the Basel School of Design, Switzerland and at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland.
Prof. Mandar Rane teaches Communication Design at the Industrial Design Centre of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Powai, Mumbai, India. His focus includes information design, semantics and communication theory. Both himself and together with students he already worked in the medical field.
background
Karel, Mandar, and Juli know each other as co-members of the international Symbol Group.
In one of Juli’s tuqtuli workshops, one of her students, Eric, visually translated the basic instructions for a painkiller, Ibubeta (see below). Shortly after Juli sent Eric’s sketches to Karel, and Mandar who work in the field of medicine and signs. Mandar immediately retranslated the visual messages back into language with one of his students. It turned out that they understood a remarkable 75 percent right. That was the spark that made Juli take the idea seriously.
ibuprofen
Ibuprofen is being sold in many versions worldwide, like Ibubeta in Germany, but always has the same ingredients. It seems ideal for this international, interdisciplinary cooperation.
objectives
We seek to translate the essence of endless written instructions into signs. As far as we know nobody tackled this before.
We will probably present the ibuproject first at the next Symbol Group conference in May 2026. Papers about the process, the results and insights will later be published in medicine and design journals. We look forward to interviews in podcasts, newspapers and magazines. Moreover, we fancy a book and with it to reach a broader, non professional audience.
After all, pictographic instructions are also conceivable in other contexts: for preparing meals, for house rules, on parking tickets and much more.
phase 1
Phase 1 is now completed. Here, the focus was on image concepts. You can see the first sketchy approaches here (the PDF is very large and may take a moment to load).
Alessandra Vierucci (design management student), Alicia Link (communication designer), Anna Bondarchuk (design management student), Ariel Martín Pérez (art director, type director), the KomunIKON collective, Divya Gagnani (product designer, visual designer), Dominic Müller (communication design student), Holger Ziemann (professor of media design), Hung-min Krämer (architect, poet), Liz Heßling (communication design student), Mark Gibson (linguist, researcher) and Nigel Holmes (designer) have done pioneering work in the field of tuqtuli translation of medical instructions.
So we were a start team of 17, originally from / living in England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA, born between 1942 and 2004. In
phase 2
we work in small groups in order to optimize the submissions we have. We boil down redundancies and will come up with up to 8 new results that will be tested worldwide in phase 3. We keep using pen (and paper). Aesthetics and style(s) will be part of our work much later when the visual ideas and the pictogrammar have reached a satisfying stadium.
Adam Yeo (communication designer), Alessandra Vierucci (design management student), Alicia Link (communication designer), Anna Bondarchuk (design management student), Ariel Martín Pérez (art director, type director), Constanze Spieß (linguist), Divya Gagnani (product designer, visual designer), Holger Ziemann (professor of media design), Juli Gudehus (artist), Karel van der Waarde (design researcher), Kathrin Kunze (medical communicator), Liz Heßling (communication design student), Mandar Rane (communication designer), Mark Gibson (linguist, researcher), Max Skorning (physician), Muna Khalil (pharmacist), Mzee Yusuf Gawany (Ophtalmologist), Nigel Holmes (designer) and Tobias Gantner (Healthcare futurist) form the team of this phase.
We originally come from / live in England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Ivory Coast, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tanzania, Ukraine and the USA, and are born between 1942 and 2003.
Recently, the ibuproject member Adam Yeo, assistant professor of graphic design, and lecturer-researcher at the University of Bondoukou, Côte d’Ivoire, had his students translate the medical instructions for ibuprofen into tuqtuli!