ADA Averted Disaster Award
It was a pleasure to be involved in this project from ideation and Start-up with a great team of scientists and visionaries. How do you measure the success of something that didn’t happen? ADA is a celebration of normality? When inventing an identity for ADA we initially we went through a moment of panic, where is all the content? If researching visuals for a disaster, there is a feast of information, however if the disaster was averted? There is no content, a mission of ADA is to create content and recognise these Hero’s working everyday to avoid disasters.
The ADA Prize is built upon the work by Prof. David Lallemant, Maricar Rabonza, Dr. Yolanda Lin and members of the Disaster Analytics for Society Lab at NTU in Singapore. The original Paper and basis of the award, Shedding light on avoided disasters: measuring the invisible benefits of disaster risk management using probabilistic counterfactual analysis, can be read here.
ADA Identity
- Research
- Logo/Website/Media
- Copywrite/Video
- Award design
The initial campaign was launched to make visible the invisible. Creating visual media and researching events that didn’t happen proved quite challenging. I took inspiration from the ‘Risk Zoo’, written by Dr. Yolanda Lin. The Risk Zoo refers to animal kingdom metaphors that are often invoked in the disaster risk world for their accessibility and familiarity when discussing difficult or uncomfortable topics.
The Award was set out to award those people who look in a mirror and see different – they see the white elephant, the grey rhino in the room. The visual inspiration was based The Risk Zoo by Yolanda C Lin. White elephant events are known events that we fail to act against. The Grey Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore: “A ‘grey rhino’ is a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat. This was the basis of the initial ADA image and social campaign.
The Award, the ADA plate takes an irregular form reflecting the environment we live in. The plate is hand-carved repurposed Irish Ash, felled by storm. The ADA is filled with a hazy resin (eco: ). The award is for those who see through the normal, and we want to shed light on them. It was commissioned and made by the Woodfactory, check out their insta page, some really beautiful work. I want to thank them for pulling it off in the way we did : ). All applicants and nominations received the ADA cert.
After the first year of nominations, it was our first encounter with the resilient community that are involved in Averting disaster, it was an honour to met just a few. Moving forward, the Identity is the Community, the ‘Unsung Hero’s’. The background image represents a blurred normality, while the ADA remains sharp, reflecting those unsung hero’s who see the unforeseen, keeping the norm.
