How do you persuade people to protect one another when trust in government is fraying, science feels remote, and everyone is tired, afraid, and divided?
That's the problem this book takes on.
Drawing on a background in public health branding and storytelling, I spoke with the storytellers who built COVID-19 campaigns around the world and traced how design, language, narrative, and the psychology of empathy actually move people during a health crisis. The result is a practical account of how empathic storytelling works when governments and science struggle to respond.
The book places the COVID-19 response in the longer history of health emergencies and the official storytelling around them, then offers tools for the communicators, designers, and storytellers who will face the next crisis:
How to use storytelling to elicit empathic behaviour during health crises
How creative and design choices shape the impact of a public health campaign
How to work across the forces I call the S4E — State, Science, Storytellers, Society, and the empathy that binds them, including the Silent stakeholders: the shadow undercurrents of money, faith, and culture
How the worldviews behind science communication determine whether a campaign lands
The multimodal choices in a storyteller's toolbox for crafting empathic public health campaigns
Design in Public Health Crises: The power of empathy in visual storytelling (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2026).
Design in Public Health Crises: The Power of Empathy in Visual Storytelling
Kehinde Bademosi
Design in Public Health Crises: The Power of Empathy in Visual Storytelling
A forthcoming book by Kehinde Bademosi, published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2026.
The book examines how six countries used visual storytelling, posters, and public health campaigns to elicit empathy during recent pandemics, from HIV/AIDS in California to COVID-19 across Baltimore, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Nigeria, and the United States. Built around the S4E framework, it offers a way of seeing public health communication that places empathy at its center.
To be notified when the book is released, contact me
Roberta Volpin was a lead ER doctor at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. In this short video, she describes the dilemma of messaging and why public health crises and pandemic preparedness are not just about science. They are often about messaging, power dynamics, and systems.