Alvin Pontvik

With personal experience of daily medication, I have developed a deep understanding of the challenges involved in both remembering your medicine and always having it accessible. This instinct sparked an interest in medicine storage as a design problem. The project started as a broad investigation of medicine storage in everyday life but evolved to focus on a more specific context – summer camps for children and young people.

The focus is on Solvik Expedition, part of the Children’s Day Foundation, which runs summer camps in the Stockholm archipelago. The organisation has been arranging camps since the early 1900s, and Solvik is one of the farms on ‘Children’s Island’. Every summer, the farm takes in about 250 children and young people over five twelve-day periods. Based on this environment, two complementary products have been developed to ensure safe, structured and accessible management of medicines: a cabinet for central medicine storage, and a bag as a mobile medicine solution.

The cabinet functions as a central and secure place for all personal medicine on the farm. It is strategically located to make it easily accessible for the staff in their daily work. Each child has their own, clearly defined compartment, which creates structure and reduces the risk of mix-ups. The lower part of the cabinet has space for associated bags, making it easy to quickly organise and prepare medicines for activities off the farm. The design focuses on overview, safety and effective management in a situation where many children and medicines need to be managed concurrently.

The bag is a multifunctional and portable solution used when the group leaves the farm; for example, on a hike or other excursion. The bag is also designed with individual compartments for each child’s medicine, which makes it easy to maintain the same structure as in the cabinet, even while on the move. This ensures that the medicines can be quickly located and administered at the right time. The bag combines functionality and clarity with a robust and easy-to-carry format, adapted for an active environment in which flexibility is crucial.