The Mound - #26 - Burning in Silence
Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.
What if, for a seatbelt to work, you first had to eskimo kiss whoever was driving? How many more people would die on our roads each year? And which demographic do we think might make up the majority of those victims?
A ridiculous, morbid thought-exercise, yes. It's also a pretty good analogy for the ongoing crisis of which we write to you today.
Data from SunSmart indicates that about half of the young men in Australia will sustain sunburn on their back or shoulders at some point this Summer.
Developmental psychologists might attribute this to the meme of the young man as a risk-taker - with his 'lax 'tude toward skincare and really everything about him being simply the result of an under-developed prefrontal cortex.
As things heat up this year, though, we've found ourselves asking, "What if he doesn't want to burn? What if the young man is fully aware of sunburn's potentially lethal effects - scared of them, even?
"What if he just doesn't know who or how to ask for some help rubbing sunscreen into his back-skin?"
If you're a male who's ever worn sunscreen, you know the feeling. You've scanned the group you were with and performed a little mental arithmetic to discern who amongst this group - if anyone - is an appropriate ask.
Who here - if anyone - will I ask to rub some sunscreen into my back-skin?
Any UX or CX designer will tell you that friction - however slight - can drastically alter the outcome of an enterprise, especially when that point of friction is multiplied over a large enough sample size. They - as well as any doctor - can help us to imagine the untold damage just a second of discomfort has wrought upon the lives of so many Australians and their families. Lives have been lost to this - because, unfortunately, that's just how cancer works.
To help put an end to this needless burning, we at Good One hope that you'll join us this December as we set a world record in support of Cancer Council Victoria.
This is… The Big Back Slap 2023
That's right - on the 16th of December we're going to break the world record for the longest chain of men simultaneously applying sunscreen to each other's back-skin. (See the event details here.)
If you can't make it to the event, please consider donating to the fundraiser or purchasing a shirt (all profits go to Cancer Council Victoria - with a BIG thanks to VOLI for donating the blanks).
If you can't spare the money, then please share this video with your friends as we aim to end this stigma for good. We know a lot of powerful people read The Mound - if you have any ideas of how we can push this further, please let us know.
Folks, our dream is not a world in which everyone feels comfortable asking for a hand. The dream is a world in which no one has to ask.
Thank you, Australia.
