Donate Yourself: an AR trail exploring the future of organ, tissue and body data donation

Donate Yourself is an Augmented Reality (AR) experience that blends sound and 3D visuals with non-linear narrative to spark debates about our organs, tissue and body data. It was created through a year-long collaboration with interactive design collective body>data>space and scientists from the Human Cell Atlas project (HCA). The HCA is a multidisciplinary scientific research project that aims to map the function of all 37 trillion cells in the human body. The project was one of four larger commissioned works by One Cell At A Time (OCAAT), a public engagement programme which brought together communities, patients and researchers to build the HCA. Funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Project Curator Suzy O’Hara. The OCAAT programme had a total reach (from July 2020 to December 2021) of at least 7,047 in person and online engagements. OCAAT had two key strands: some of the programme explored “what it is to be normal?” while Donate Yourself, among other outputs, focused on “what influences peoples’ value and trust in research involving tissue donation and open access data?”