The Report: Immaculate Conception Available

The controversial topic we work on was the surrogacy practice. Surrogacy is an arrangement in which a woman carries and delivers a child for another couple or person. Even if a lot of people don’t know about this practice, after a first step of methodic web research we discovered that the topic was trending and generating many discussions throughout the web. A biggest subtopic emerged from this preliminary research: surrogacy tourism in India. And this is what we decided to focus on. “How different countries look at surrogacy tourism in India?” We started from this question to develop our research, looking at four different domains: .com (golbal/USA), .co.in (India), .co.uk (United Kingdom), .it (Italy). The choice was related with the different law regulations of those countries. (Respectively: allow commercial surrogacy, allow commercial surrogacy (inner point of view), allow only altruistic surrogacy, ban surrogacy).

The research process was based on the Digital Methods. All the data used for the analysis was taken from the web by the team, studied, refined and then visualized.
The deep analysis performed with the report let us understand which and how many opinions are available in different countries about surrogacy in India and underlined many interesting aspects of the controversy, like the role of the media and the legal development of the practice, as well as a big debate about indian surrogate mothers’ condition, that led us to the last project that can be seen below.

The output was a book, 240 x 300 in size.

The Website: The Bill Please

Following the report, our team was asked to design and produce a website taking a position in the controversy and presenting the results of our research.
Our action is more like an advocacy action. Our goal is to change the actual situation: we agree with surrogacy in India but, as it is exercised at the moment is not a fair situation for the surrogate mothers. Moreover, there is no regulation, just “bill draft”, that still are not equal and fair regarding surrogate mother rights.

We created “The Bill, Please” a website aimed to involve and inform the user about indian surrogacy practice situation and indian surrogate mothers’ condition.
This project is addressed to the indian country, with the aim to create awareness and rise activism. It might also be used by activist groups working on the territory in many ways. We developed it not with the sole purpose of presenting data, but with the intent of using data and analysis to raise consciousness and stimulate people to take action.

The website is based on a series of controversial questions presented to the user: for every section a first question has the purpose of inspecting the awareness on the topic (we stated through the report that many radical opinions about the topic were based on ignorance) and then the second stimulates the reflection of the users, who can also go deeper in the topic by opening the focus sections of every question. These focus parts add data adapted from the report to the mixture, making the experience deeper and more involving.
At the end of the experience the user can download further material, share the website and “become himself an activist“ thanks to the “activist kit”.

As regards the visual choices, we chose to use infotography as our language.
We developed a series of metaphors based on food placed in a medical atmosphere, to accompany the fruition of the contents, explain visually some practices, enhance the message and at the same time not interfere with the perception of the topic by putting raw images.

Website
note: we do not guarantee that the website is cross browser. we apologise if you experience some problems while browsing the website

Authors

Sofia Girelli
Eleonora Grotto
Pietro Lodi
Daniele Lupatini
Emilio Patuzzo