EDedu Home page
EDedu is an eating disorder education platform, built for a Design and Mental Health course at Northeastern. In 2023 it won the Meserve Design Excellence Award and a Creative Research Project Award. The project began with a search: image after image of thin white women, on websites meant to help. Fewer than 6% of people with eating disorders are medically underweight. When the imagery says otherwise, people conclude the resources aren't for them, and stop looking.
No bodies, no scales, no tape measures
The system is built from what was left out. No body imagery, nothing a user could measure themselves against. In its place, soft overlapping shapes that read as approachable before they read as anything else, Gotham Rounded, and orange as the accent: a colour with no moral history, neither red's wrongness nor green's virtue.
On the home page the shapes form an interactive map of four disorders and their overlapping symptoms. Hover, and a recovery narrative appears, someone's own words doing the work a stock photo never could. The question underneath never assumes: "Do you or someone you know relate to any of these experiences?" meets people where they are.
I'm currently rebuilding EDedu. Both versions will stay on this page, because the distance between them is the real case study.