This is what I built for Config Makeathon, and I still can't tell if it's a smart idea or an obvious one nobody bothered to make.

Someone walks into an ER and can't speak the language, whether they're a refugee, a tourist, or a Deaf patient. The nurse needs to know where it hurts and how badly, and right now that conversation happens through pointing, Google Translate, or a cousin on speakerphone. Babel is a tablet you hand the patient: they tap where it hurts, pick how the pain feels, choose a face for the severity, and it builds a card the clinician can read or hear in their own language. Four screens, no login, wipes after every patient.

The Makeathon made me realize how much of good design is just saying no. I wanted to add a symptom checker, allergy flags, a meds history, and every one of those additions made the thing worse. The moment it tries to be clever about medicine it becomes a liability nobody wants near a real hospital, and it stops being something a scared person can figure out in a few seconds. I deleted more ideas than I built.

There is almost no text in the whole thing, because someone who can't read the local language has to get through the entire flow on pictures alone, which means every icon either did its job or had to go. Pain severity uses the Wong-Baker faces from pediatric wards since that scale already works across cultures and I had no business reinventing it. Color never carries meaning on its own and only ever backs up a shape, because red reads as danger in one country and luck in another and I don't get to choose which patient walks in.

Does it beat a real interpreter? Not even close. But there isn't one in every ER at 3am, and the distance between no shared language at all and okay, I can show you where it hurts is the gap I was trying to close.

If you want to break it, try it here: https://tidal-mac-16568585.figma.site Would love to hear how I can make it more effective!