When it comes to gawking actual behavioral change is the aim. The key to achieve that is by directly confronting onlookers with their wrongdoing instead of educating them after.

In Germany, an ambulance should arrive within 8 minutes after an emergency call. But this has changed dramatically. Every second emergency response is delayed.

With the omnipresence of smartphones, onlookers have become a huge issue. These “civilian paparazzi” take photos of victims and impede life-saving rescue operations with their sensationalism. Although it became a criminal offense in January 2021, action is rarely taken against ruthless onlookers.

Onlookers are driven by the unusual nature of an accident scene. They want to capture this extraordinary situation, to share it with other people and enjoy the social attention.

We have to trigger a feeling of guilt that outweighs the craving for social attention. Our approach is to confront onlookers with their misconduct right at the moment of their wrongdoing.

Turning smartphones from problem boosters into problem solvers. We have developed an innovative digital pattern, that functions like a camouflaged QR code, to trick smartphone cameras.

When an onlooker tries to capture a rescue operation with his smartphone, a message will pop up on the display - confronting the onlooker with his wrongdoing and educating him about proper behavior at accident scenes.

After 4 months, 22% of Germans already said they had heard of the idea. 68% consider the idea as helpful (Survey Akkon University). The number of paramedic-job-applications at Johanniter Unfall Hilfe doubled in the months following the campaign. The media coverage after the presentation of the live-saving design raised international attention and awareness about the dangers of gawking. Newspapers and television shows around the world started to report about the idea. The equivalent advertising value of national & international news was about 2.6 Mio Euros in the month of presentation. The media responses got shared by thousands of social media users.