World Mosquito Project

Helping communities around the world prevent the spread of mosquito-borne disease

Eliminate Dengue (now called The World Mosquito Program) aims to help communities around the world prevent the spread of mosquito-borne disease. Using ground-breaking bacterial implant technology in wild mosquito populations, the program that was trialled in Australia has now scaled globally and is operating in over 11 countries and affecting hundreds of thousands of lives.

♥️ I'm proud of...

  • An immediate 2x improvement in the speed of releasing, capturing, and processing field data
  • The field research to understand and document the end-to-end process of the Wolbachia replacement release and capture method
  • Co-designing, collaborating, & testing with digital experts and field officers
  • The end-to-end product design across mobile and desktop interfaces for a never-before-seen software system
  • Hearing that, 10 years later, the application is still in use, still fit-for-purpose, and that it played an important role in scaling the program globally

Design methods

  • Contextual enquiry
  • Taskflow modelling
  • Demographic categorisation
  • Ecosystem mapping
  • Workshop facilitation
  • Prototyping (pen/paper)
  • Visual design
Contextual enquiry

Documenting the scientific method to deeply understand it

To achieve a vision of such ambition requires teams of specialists working together rigorously across the East Coast of Australia – each playing their role in the complicated process of breeding, releasing, & capturing mosquitos, as well as analysing the data. With a digital tool required to facilitate the flow of information between all parties, it was important to ‘ride-along’ with each user group to understand the day-to-day tasks each had to complete.

Understanding before solving: multiple users, locations, specialisations and constraints made the end-to-end visualisation and understanding of the process of upmost importance before getting into solution development
Co-design

Experts as design allies

One of the challenges of working with experts is that, well, they believe they're experts; and they are. They are exceptional problem solvers in their domain of expertise and these experts created some incredibly robust systems to help them complete their work. What could 'design' possibly improve upon?

No one likes change and most people are proud of the processes they’ve designed for their own work. Showing them that it could be even better requires building trust and rapport first. To say, I’m on your side, let’s work together. And for them to respond with, OK, let’s do this.

Above: Annotated map of mosquito trap locations and priorities using week-old data

Key user groups

  • Field entomologists: Teams who work on releasing mosquitoes, and manage the trapping of samples, are typically split in their time between being out in the field, and being based in an office.
  • Lab Managers and technicians: Staff who analyse the samples from the field (e.g. to determine if Wolbachia is present, or to establish the sex of mosquitoes collected) are based in either a ‘field laboratory’ (a lab located near the #eld site) or in a main laboratory (such as at the University partner).
  • Community Engagement Officers: Team members who work directly with establishing the support or managing concerns of the community spend a mix of their time in the field, and in the office.
  • Ad hoc users: People who interact with the system infrequently, most likely to use it’s output for their own work i.e. Map specialists to optimise for route planning

We only have to do 3 out 10 steps now. It’s so intuitive, we don’t even need to train anyone on it!

–GIS specialist and project field officer

Solution design

Answering big questions, iteratively and together

It can sometimes be difficult to insert a tool or process into a complex system without disrupting the regular cadences that the teams and systems have set up to do their everyday work. Matt facilitated an iterative approach to a build, test, release cycle to answer fundamental questions quickly – e.g. Would the network connection across North East Australia be reliable enough for the use of mobiles in the field?

Above: Early stage screen designs for the iOS application. These designs were shipped and iteratively tested by field officers to optimize for when and how they encounter data collection moments in the field.

Working alongside key user groups, the product team slowly but surely built the riskiest pieces of the platform first, checking the solution’s effectiveness regularly to ensure that we weren’t designing ourselves into a corner we couldn’t get out of.

A lightning fast, purpose-built screen for recording incidence of Wolbachia spread across mosquito populations. The screen design not only increased the speed at which entomologists could record information, but it did it a much greater accuracy then their previous systems.

Above: Custom-designed desktop screen for fast and accurate mosquito processing
Results

A 2x improvement in release efficiency and accuracy of field data

In short, the releasing team saw an immediate doubling of their release efficiency and the data team reported higher accuracy and faster turnaround of the analysis of the data. This in turn meant that the field team could plan routes faster, more efficiently, and, ultimately, handle higher volumes of data without having to scale the number of people working on the project.

Above: One of the most important parts of the work – being around great people (and wearing very heavy, sweaty denim uniforms in 30+ degree heat and 90% humidity)

Tracker, as it became affectionately known, provided a foundational and functional proof-of-concept for a data tool that could be easily adapted beyond Australian shores to countries with vastly higher incidence of dengue fever.

It’s revolutionised mapping for us. I can spend more time analysing data rather than fixing it

– Jack Brown-Kenyon, GIS specialist