Fabcare
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FABCARE is an experimental initiative developed within Distributed Design Market Platform by the makerspace Polifactory and technically supported by Centro Medico Santagostino. Launched in spring 2018, the FABCARE challenge aimed to demonstrate how designers, makers and independent innovators – also interacting with patients, caregivers and their associations – can concretely design, produce and distribute open source healthcare solutions with a real market potential. Over sixty Italian and foreign designers have presented twenty product ideas. Five of these were selected from an evaluation panel composed of healthcare experts, fab labs, designers, and policymakers in order to be prototyped, presented at the European Maker Faire Rome and then released on distributeddesign.eu. All these projects are not medical devices, but solutions that provide informative support and help with prevention or monitoring activities regarding the problem or pathology for which they were designed. One of the five selected project is Mole Mapper, a small tool for skin cancer prevention designed by Ilaria Vitali, Mila Stepanovic and Patrizia Bolzan, three young researchers in design from Politecnico di Milano. It can be used to check all skin moles, looking for warning signs. Self-exams can help people to identify potential skin cancers early, when they can almost always be completely cured. It is important to identify moles that look or feel different than the others on your body, and to routinely visit a dermatologist. Mole Mapper summarizes what physicians call “the ABCDE of melanoma”, the warning signs to recognize changes in the moles on the body, in particular if they are asymmetrical and bigger than 6mm. Moreover, it reminds to control moles’ borders, color, and evolution in time. Mole Mapper is fabricated in 30 seconds with a laser cut using PMMA scraps, it offers an inexpensive tangible way (it costs 1 euro!) to promote awareness about melanoma prevention, also imagining an alternative distribution in places like beauty centers and tattoo studios. For these reasons, this small object has been shortlisted for the Distributed Design Award 2019.
