Building Healthy Sun Protection Habits in Latvian Children
How can we transform sun protection from a seasonal parental chore into intuitive, peer-supported habits that Latvian children actually want to adopt?
Team
Yuliya Zakolyabina,
Lívia Badiani,
Nada Jouibli,
Sobia Farooqui,
Amanda Strīgele
Timeframe & Place
January – Juin 2025 in Kuldīga, Latvia
Recognition
Finalist Certificate
Files Directory
See here
Role
Design Researcher
Business Strategist
Systems Analyst
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Service design frameworks
Behavioral analysis models
The project:
At ISDIN, building healthy habits in children is a top priority, especially around sun protection to counteract the damaging effects of UV radiation. Latvia’s distinctive environment, with its seasonal sunlight scarcity yet high skin cancer rates, creates complex challenges for embedding sun safety in daily life. Our project dives into this cultural and behavioral paradox to create meaningful, sustainable sun protection habits among Latvian youth.
The outcome:
SPARK emerged as a playful service ecosystem that transforms sun protection from invisible, parent-dependent task into a visible, peer-reinforced habit. Our solution combines three elements: colored sunscreen for expressive protection, NFC-enabled keychains unlocking a digital platform, and seasonal school competitions. SPARK addresses systemic barriers through behavioral design, making protection feel natural, social, and fun while building lifelong healthy habits.
Our Approach
Starting with cultural empathy
As an international team spanning five countries, we brought diverse perspectives on sun protection cultures. This global lens proved crucial for understanding how cultural beliefs, seasonal behaviors, and generational habits shape children's relationship with UV protection in ways that transcend individual education efforts.
Our process followed service design methodology, moving through four competitive rounds: Research & Discovery, Empathize & Define, Reframe & Ideate, and Develop & Prototype.
Discover: Understanding the Cultural Paradox
We began by confronting a striking contradiction: Latvia, despite limited sunny days, faces surprisingly high skin cancer rates. This Northern European paradox became our foundation for understanding local sun protection behaviors.
We designed and conducted mixed-method research combining both secondary and primary methodologies to capture the full complexity of Latvia's sun protection ecosystem. Our secondary research involved analyzing Latvian public health data, reviewing academic studies on childhood UV protection behaviors, and examining existing awareness campaigns and policies.
For primary research, we conducted extensive interviews across generational lines—speaking with grandparents about historical sun behaviors, teenagers about social media influence, and institutional actors including a vice principal in Kuldīga, local pharmacists, and representatives from SPKC (Latvia's Center for Disease Prevention and Control) about policy gaps and public health strategies.
I co-facilitated a crucial school visit activity with 3rd grade pupils in Kuldīga to directly understand children's perspectives on sun protection across seasons. This hands-on engagement revealed how children actually think about and experience UV protection in their daily lives, providing insights that surveys alone couldn't capture.
What emerged was a complex behavioral ecosystem. Our insights revealed fascinating tensions: the same factors both drive and hinder change. Parents increasingly invest in children's sun protection—"Moms buy perfume from the dollar store but spend 14 euros on kids' sunscreen"—yet lack consistent habits themselves. Peers influence adoption when protection is visible among friends, but also create resistance when it's uncommon.
We used the iceberg analysis uncovering deeper mental models: "out of sight, out of mind" thinking where invisible UV damage gets ignored, "reactance" against being told what to do, and "pain-driven intervention" where action only follows sunburn. These underlying beliefs explained why knowledge alone doesn't translate to behavior.
Define: reframing the System
of Care
Moving beyond individual behaviors, we conducted our ecosystem mapping exercise that revealed how children exist within a "system of care"—a complex web of actors including parents, teachers, coaches, peers, and broader institutional forces. When this network aligns, children naturally adopt protection. When it doesn't, even well-intentioned parents struggle.
We synthesized our research into three interconnected barriers: (In)visibility (sun protection lacks visible cues and role models), Access and Guidance (families prioritize urgent expenses over protection products while beauty-focused messaging excludes boys and younger children), and Triggers to Care (protection actions are reactive, initiated by sunburn rather than prevention).
The thematic analysis revealed three key insights:
Latvian children aged 9-12 struggle to adopt sun-safe habits when outdoor spaces lack visible role models—making protection feel optional rather than essential
Parents need support from trusted adults supervising outdoor time to turn protection into shared, low-effort habits
Current sun protection content targets teenage girls through beauty framing, excluding boys and younger kids
These insights pushed us toward a fundamental reframe:
How might we make sun safety cues more familiar and intuitive, so children independently recognize and adopt protection practices as part of outdoor activities—while easing parental responsibility?
Develop: Co-creating with Children & Parents
With our problem clearly defined, we moved into intensive ideation and concept development. We conducted "What if?" exploration sessions that opened new possibility spaces: What if sun protection products reflected diverse identities from sports heroes to forest explorers? What if outdoor environments naturally prompted behavior without parental reminders? What if kids reminded each other, turning protection into peer-supported behavior?
We developed our core design principles based on behavioral science frameworks. We identified that successful solutions would need to make sun protection Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely (EAST principles) while addressing Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation (COM-B framework).
Our ideation process generated multiple concepts before converging on the ecosystem approach. Early ideas included individual behavior tracking apps, gamified protection challenges, and school-based education programs. However, I advocated for a systems thinking approach that would address all three barriers simultaneously rather than focusing on single touchpoints.
The breakthrough came when we combined visibility, peer influence, and institutional support into one integrated service ecosystem. This led to SPARK's three-element design: physical products that make protection visible, digital tools that provide timely nudges, and social structures that embed protection into group activities.
I contributed to developing the core concept refinement that distinguished SPARK from existing school campaigns through three innovations:
positioning sun protection as self-expression rather than health compliance
embedding protection within competitive team dynamics
and creating technological bridges between school rituals and independent behavior.
Deliver: From Concept to Service Ecosystem
Building on our behavioral insights and system mapping, we developed SPARK as an integrated service ecosystem that systematically addresses each identified barrier through three interconnected elements.
The Physical Layer: Making Protection Visible
The NFC-enabled keychain with dual-color sunscreen stick directly tackles our (In)visibility barrier. I advocated for the bold blue tinted sunscreen because our research showed children respond to visible, expressive elements that make protection social rather than individual compliance. The keychain attachment ensures constant availability while UV-reactive coating provides real-time environmental feedback—making invisible UV exposure tangible.
The Digital Layer: Timely Nudges Without Friction
The SPARK app addresses our Access and Guidance barrier while solving practical school phone restrictions. Children briefly tap keychains to access UV information and games, then put devices away. This provides Timely nudges without constant phone interaction, while casual learning content avoids beauty-focused messaging that excluded boys and younger children in our research.
The Social Layer: Peer-Reinforced Rituals
Competition and school integration components shift sun protection from reactive (post-sunburn) to proactive (pre-activity) behavior. PE class rituals like "Let's put our colorful stripes on!" embed protection into existing group activities, transforming individual compliance into collective achievement and team participation.
Business Model: Balancing Impact and Sustainability
I contributed significantly to our business model canvas, ensuring SPARK creates value across the entire ecosystem while maintaining revenue sustainability. Our approach balances social impact with commercial viability through direct sunscreen sales, refill subscriptions, and branded charm collections. For the pilot phase, partnerships with Latvia's Health School Network ensure broad access regardless of family economic status, while the refillable system reduces long-term costs and creates sustainable revenue.
Service Blueprint: From School Ritual to Personal Behavior
The service blueprint maps the complete journey from teacher registration through independent child behavior, showing how school rituals create social Opportunity, peer visibility provides Motivation, and easy reapplication tools build Capability. Most critically, it demonstrates the transition where external reinforcement becomes internal motivation, achieving our goal of sustainable behavior change that feels natural rather than imposed.
Impact & Recognition
ISDIN's expert feedback praised our strong integration with PE classes and competitive elements, while noting the solution's differentiation from existing campaigns through three innovations: making sun protection a form of self-expression, embedding it within team dynamics, and creating technological bridges between school rituals and independent behavior.
What I Learned
This project transformed my understanding of behavior change design. Rather than focusing on individual education, I learned to map entire ecosystems of influence and identify systemic intervention points. The power of making invisible behaviors visible—through colored sunscreen and peer rituals—showed me how design can reshape social norms.
I discovered the critical importance of cultural context in health interventions. Latvia's seasonal sun-seeking behaviors and generational habit gaps required solutions that worked with, not against, existing cultural patterns. This taught me that effective service design must honor cultural realities while gently redirecting harmful behaviors.
Most importantly, I learned that sustainable behavior change happens through systems, not individuals. By designing SPARK as an ecosystem connecting schools, peers, technology, and family dynamics, we created multiple reinforcement points that make healthy habits feel natural rather than imposed. This systems thinking approach now influences how I approach all behavioral design challenges.