The Postpartum Bridge (Team 21 - Reset Group)

Inspiration

Our inspiration was the monologue from Barbie where America Ferrera's character talks about the various experiences and oftentimes struggles of women. We took a part of the monologue:

"You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people."

And decided to delve deeper into the struggles of postpartum women in the workplace, especially since there hasn't exactly been an digital experience created for this particular problem.

What it does

Our experience is a website that can be accessed by anyone however it is targeted towards people in the workplace. It is both an immersive experience and an educational resource as it provides users with information about the experiences of new mothers and shows how employers and other employees can assist them in the workplace. It supports women by providing them resources such as helplines, informative websites and allows them to have all the resources they need in one place. Other employees and employers can also use the website to assist their learning about the postpartum experience thus allowing them to better support new mothers in the workplace and facilitating a more inclusive environment.

How we built it

The way we built up the website was on ReadyMag as it was somewhat easy to use and could create a prototype quickly without the need to code. The visuals of the immersive experience was modelled in blender and rendered using cycles to create an isometric room that would separate our website from other websites as we liked the more comforting and cartoonish style of the 3D space. This allowed us to convey information in a more immersive and interesting way rather than listing out blocks of text.

Challenges we ran into

One of us had to learn blender for the first time which was difficult however they had previous 3D experience so once they got an understanding of the HUD and controls they were able to make the render in 2 hours. The website itself only works on desktop and not on phone due to time constraints however we managed to pull together a prototype that still works. Finding an initial idea was also a struggle however after one of us found the Barbie monologue we were able to interpret the brief with the quote that we found.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning blender in a few hours
Making a website on ReadyMag that works and is visually pleasing
Showing our learning and progression and hopefully being able to assist postpartum women with our designs