Bengal Fights Corona, a state Covid board
A public Covid-19 dashboard for West Bengal: the state’s case counts, containment zones and hospital beds on one page, for people looking for a bed rather than for a briefing.
The problem
Case counts, containment zones and hospital bed availability lived in three different places in 2020, and a family needing a bed had to assemble the answer themselves from a bulletin, a notification and a phone call.
- Platform
- Public web dashboard, phone-first
- Timeline
- 2020
- My role
- Information architecture, interface and visual design
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Order
The page is sequenced by how worry actually escalates: state total, then district, then the zone you live in and when it lifts, then beds. Nobody reaching the bed table is browsing.
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Separation
Hospitals and safe houses are counted apart. Treatment and isolation are different needs, and one combined figure would send somebody to the wrong building.
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Restraint
Four registers, one derived share, no gauges. A dashboard read in distress should carry the fewest things that answer the question, not the most things the data allows.
Outcome
A concept board, rebuilt here as a working interface with its own figures declared as invented.
In the middle of 2020 the information a household in West Bengal actually needed was scattered. Case counts were in a daily press bulletin, containment zones in a district notification, and how many beds a hospital had left was a phone call if you were lucky and a rumour if you were not. This is a single public board that puts those three in one place and treats them as the same question, because to a family they are.
The order of the page is the order of the worry. The state total comes first because it is what a person checks by habit. The district break-down comes next because that is where they live. Containment zones and their dates come third, because the practical question behind a zone is when it lifts. Beds come last and in the most detail, because by the time somebody is reading that row they are not browsing.
Hospitals and safe houses are separated rather than added together. They are different things — one is treatment, the other is isolation for people who cannot isolate at home — and a single number covering both would be the kind of tidy figure that sends somebody to the wrong building.
The board below is rebuilt and working, and it is stripped of the state emblem, the portrait and the party colours that were on the original. What is being shown is the information design, not the government that commissioned the look of it. The counts it carries are invented, and the note under it says so: the original board ran on placeholders too, and a health dashboard is the last place to make an invented number look real.
The board, rebuilt unbranded
Working interface. Choose a district, switch the register, read the beds.
- Confirmed
- 0
- Active
- 0
- Recovered
- 0
- Deceased
- 0
District-wise summary
Containment zones and dates
Hospitals and safe houses
- Facilities
- 0
- Beds
- 0
- Vacant
- 0
| District | Facility | Total beds | Vacant |
|---|
The figures above are invented. The board of 2020 carried placeholders of its own — one number, 645678, repeated across all four registers — and putting something that looked like real case data in their place is the single dishonest move a rebuilt health dashboard could make. These numbers exist to drive the interface and nothing else. The districts, and the hospitals named in the original board, are real.
The project
Credits
- Concept & design Rabiul Islam
- Status Concept, shown unbranded