The Ibuproject is an informal international, interdisciplinary cooperation together with all those who would like to get involved. It seeks to develop pictographic 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.
We, that is Karel (Belgium), Mandar (India), Juli (Germany), Ahmad and Shuhan (USA).
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.
Dr. Shuhan He is a physician living in Boston, USA. He is the inventor of the anatomical heart and lung Emojis. He teaches Emergency Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and serves as the Program Director of Healthcare Data Analytics at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute. Ahmad Hassan is a Pakistani, also living in Boston, USA. He studied medicine and is now a research fellow, Dr. He being his mentor.
Our aim is to translate the essence of endless written instructions into signs. As far as we know nobody tackled this before.
We will present the Ibuproject at the next Symbol Group conference in autumn 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.
Are you enticed to join in? Wonderful!
You are cordially invited to participate in making the world a better place!
Please find more details here.
Best wishes
Ahmad, Juli, Karel, Mandar, and Shuhan