Addiction Care Today

Launched in Spring 2024, Addiction Care Today (ACT) at Rhode Island Hospital is part of Brown University Health Addiction Medicine. It was created in an effort to reduce the barriers to treatment for a population that has been severely underserved by the healthcare system.

ACT offers walk-in and same-day appointments to make it easy for people who use drugs and alcohol to start treatment. We have been working with ACT to examine the role that stigma plays in people’s experience of health care, to help them find where stigma lurks even in the efforts of well-meaning institutions and individuals, and to develop better design considerations for every part of the clinic.

Our Spring 2024 studio course was run in tandem with ACT’s launch. Students engaged in site visits and discussions with ACT staff. Together, they developed and prototyped anti-stigma approaches to elements like signage, products, services, arrival, departure, waiting, light, and sound. ACT adopted a graphic identity and wayfinding system proposed by students Natalie Wang, Santiago Alvarado, and Yao Wang. ACT staff reported to us that the questions students were asking opened up their perceptions to new areas of improvement.

 

Our partnership with ACT continues. Over summer 2024, we developed an anti-stigma campaign with ACT for National Recovery Month 2024 and ensured that the student-developed identity system remained usable after the students’ departures. We are working in partnership with the Division of Addiction Medicine to develop more prototyping opportunities and to document those efforts for wider adaptation to more clinics, here in Rhode Island and across the country. Our aim is to create an Anti-Stigma Design Manual.