For THE PUBLIC SECTOR
3 min read
First aid, redesigned as city infrastructure
Most Germans took their last first aid course over 15 years ago. Designed as a public health service for the government, I CAN HELP closes this first aid competence gap through a free kit and a shared community hub, reducing the cost of minor emergencies in an already overburdened care system.
ROLE
Product Strategy
UX Design
TYPE
Servicedesign
AI ToolKIT
Nano Banana
Midjourney
I. Challenge
Everybody wants to help,
few actually can.
For half of adults in Germany, the last first-aid course was more than ten years ago, often taken to pass the driver's license test.¹ So when it counts, only 33% can name the right steps, and one in four say they would not dare help at all.²
Yet most consider first-aid training important, and many would even support mandatory refreshers.³ Still, few take up the existing offers.
10
years
since the last first-aid course
Voluntary
Course fee
Full-day
Missing emergency skills.
In 2024, Germany spent €7.5 billion on emergency medical services, more than twice what it spent in 2014.⁴ Missing competence becomes a cost the system carries. Refresher courses from DRK, ASB and Malteser are available in every city, but they cost money, are mostly voluntary, and require a full day of attendance. Only 8% of adults refresh their emergency skills within six months.⁵
How might we…
… design a learning system for Germany's first-aid providers
that it constantly present in everyday life?
II. Solution
A learning system that builds first-aid competence through small, repeated moments in daily life.
KIT.
HUB.
PULSE.
Service design for everyday first aid skills.
First aid kits personalized.
The free Starter Kit is available at citizen offices, schools, kindergartens, and gyms, in the places people already go. Each kit is tailored to how the owner lives and designed to be visible, a small statement of readiness. Pop-Aid stations at events refill and extend it, keeping the kit current. Every interaction turns first aid from a forgotten certificate into a physical presence.
Time to talk about it.
A QR on the kit opens the Hub, where anyone can add an their own first-aid story. Sharing helps the teller make sense of what happened. Peer stories carry more weight for readers than any official source.⁶
Over time, the stories mark hazards, show where nearby first aid kits are and other official points as help within reach.
Every story is encrypted and anonymised and verfiyded by AI and emergency-service experts.
Every action strengthens the Pulse.
Every action earns points for the community's Pulse. Refilling a kit, reading a story or sharing knowledge makes the score rise. Visible everywhere in the app and on public city screens. It is not a personal ranking, but a shared signal of how prepared a school, team or neighbourhood is.
Small teams that motivate.
Each Pulse belongs to a school, a football club, or a workplace team. Every kit refill or shared story stays visible as a contribution to the group. Research on collective action shows that small groups sustain accountability better than large ones.⁸
Visible in every place.
The Pulse of your city updates live on the digital screens already installed at bus stops, shopping streets, and public squares. Visible civic action strengthens community and the shared belief that people can act together.⁷ First aid moves from a personal reminder into a permanent, shared civic conversation.
III. Decisions
How we designed a community driven
learning system for first aid.
Decision 1
Stirring community behavior,
not individual users.
Awareness and willingness for learning first aid is there, what’s missing is a motivation to engage outside of courses. We decided to design for community behavior instead of individual users.
With the Pulse score system we used Collective Protection Motivation⁹ to turn every action into a contribution for the team and the city, so people learn to see themselves as one unit. Every design choice downstream, from sharing stories, presenting kits to each other, followed from that decision.
SOLO.
COMMUNITY.
Decision 2
Spaced repetition.
First-aid courses exist but stay unused because of length, cost, and signup effort. So we asked what else counts as learning first aid? Refilling a kit, showing it to a friend, or reading a Hub story are short interactions can also count as preparation. Each one keeps first aid present, and research shows repeated low-effort exposure builds readiness better than a single session.⁶
Decision 3
Making first aid accessible & frictionless
First aid is a universal skill that everyone wants to learn. Access & friction is what stops them, so removing every threshold from engaging with the topic became a core design principle:
KIT. Starter kit free at Bürgerbüro, school, or gym. Extension modules for a small fee.
HUB. The kit's QR code creates the account on the spot. Just add a first name, no email or password.
IDENTITY. Choosing the name over a ficitve name should accesibble for everyonb"I CAN HELP" over an earlier legal-code idea. The word "can" signals empowerment, not obligation.
IV. Impact
"I CAN HELP." brilliantly shifts the focus from medical hardware to community behavior. Its ecosystem of personal kits and digital hubs weaves emergency preparedness into everyday life, fostering community resilience and mutual trust in a highly impactful way.
iF Design Jury
A concept worth exploring more
I CAN HELP received the iF DESIGN STUDENT AWARD 2026 as one of just 90 winning concepts selected from nearly 7,000 submissions across 84 countries. An international jury of design experts assessed the entries for problem-solving, social responsibility, solidarity, user experience and whether the concept makes economic sense. The award recognised I CAN HELP as a viable direction for making public preparedness part of everyday life.
The next step would be a limited municipal pilot: starting with free kits in one local community and measuring whether they lead to renewed participation in first-aid training and shared learning formats. The results would show which parts of the system deserve scaling.
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I design B2B products & features that grow with research that clarifies.
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