Edu DesignShop @ MIT
Hello Maharam blog followers!
My second post is about a recent experience that has helped me understand some of the large-scale systemic issues with the education system as it exists today. Since my work at Porvir this summer is based on comprehending the latest innovations and approaches to education, I was thrilled to participate in the weekend-long workshop about education and design thinking.
Last weekend, I had the privilege to represent RISD with 3 schoolmates, Ryan Mather, Eliot Bassett-Cann and Denise Thornberry, at a unique “Design-a-thon” at MIT. The EduDesignShop, mentioned in my last post, was an opportunity for students, educators, policy-makers and other professionals to join together and use the ‘Design Thinking’ approach to address issues in our education system. The purpose of the weekend-long event was to launch ideas into the education world that would trigger creative solutions to systemic problems.
Our team, composed of three students and one architect, had by far the youngest average age. At first, I was a bit apprehensive of the lack of experience in our young team, but ultimately our proximity to the issues that were being discussed actually gave a more personal insight on many of the issues, and so, gave us an advantage.
Among the many topics we discussed, the general idea of focus versus broad interests as well as the notion of failure became a trend in our brainstorms. After many opportunities to step back and understand our drawings, maps and post-its, we came to realize that the value in our whole experience at the DesignShop was in documentation. By tracking our thoughts throughout our process, we were able to identify patterns, retrace our steps and link ideas that may have seemed random but were in fact totally connected to one another.
When it came time to hone down on a concept for the final presentation, a mere 36 hours after we had all met for the first time, we had our documentation to synthesize. At that point, it was clear that documentation is the key to comprehension, and that failure as we are taught in school should be considered in a different approach. Failure should be noted as an opportunity for improvement, not like many public schools are teaching it today. We decided to present our solution for a systemic change in education as the “Epic Fail Book,” which is a place for kids to take down notes on their daily experiences. The journal has an obvious physical component, but the project is about much more than the actual journal. It will provide a means to challenge the approach that the system uses to help students understand success and failure. This journal is intended to be as personal or pragmatic as its user would like, and serve as an opportunity for kids to engage with their world in a more synthesized way. We hope that this project will be used to help your kids make connections between what they are learning in classrooms and their daily experiences from the soccer field to the kitchen.
At around 5pm, 25 presentations later, the winners of the design challenge were announced. Many of the proposals had been for web platforms to be used collaboratively by students, teachers and even members of each community, so we were surprised with the judges’ decision to award us a prize for our project. The “Epic Fail Journal” was awarded some financial assistance to get things started, as well as a consultation with Massachusetts Secretary of Education Matthew Malone on the implementation of our project. Whether this project comes with me to Sao Paulo or not, I am excited to apply many of the concepts I learned last weekend to my work with education innovation. I will bring this experience with me, and hope to be able to implement some of the take-aways at my job this summer (and beyond)! Stay tuned for more news…
Preparations for a Summer at Porvir!
I am thrilled to be writing my first post for the Maharam STEAM Fellows blog! This morning started with a really exciting Skype call with Patricia Gomes at Porvir. In addition to going over the details of my arrival at their office in June, we spoke of all the exciting events happening between now and then!
Over the last few months, I have been researching all the sources I have access to for innovations in education, and philosophy on the most appropriate pedagogies for each situation. My assignment at Porvir this summer will be to compile the “top 100” innovations in education over the last year to create a roadmap for educators to include alternative practices in their classrooms. The idea behind this is not only to provide a resource to reach out to the widest possible audience, but also to serve as a reliable base for all education-related media from around the world.
Things are really crazy at Porvir this week in preparation for their annual conference, TransFORMAR. The conference, happening on April 28th, will feature Mitchel Resnik, from the MIT Media Lab as the keynote speaker, among many other international education innovators. I am really excited about this opportunity for Porvir to introduce these changemakers to Brazilian education reformers! I am doing my part in this effort by staying tuned to social media and advertising the live streaming from the conference in the networks available here at RISD and Brown. You can find out more about this event on THIS link!
In the next few weeks, I am also preparing for my participation in a really awesome workshop at the MIT Media Lab. This workshop will produce resources that I will definitely be able to apply to my job this summer, and I am so excited to get in touch with others in this field! Below is a short blurb from their website:
“The Education DesignShop is a 2-day workshop for interdisciplinary teams to first learn design thinking and then apply it to the education system. We will bring together 25 of each students, educators, policymakers, and industry personnel (100 participants in total) to create innovative strategies for implementing solutions in the world of education.”
You can also read some of the sweet articles I am beginning to revise for the publication on Porvir’s website. We are working on translations, making them more available to a international audience. The publication I will work on this summer will be a compilation of all these awesome resources that I, along with the Porvir team, have been researching and compiling over the last year. It is intended to reach to an audience even greater than our website, and the format will de determined by the best way to reach out–which is the heart of the challenge!
That’s it for now, but stay tuned for more updates as the semester draws to a close!
Way-finding in Delhi’s urban villages
I am excited to be working in New Delhi, India this summer with the residents of Zamrudpur urban village, to use design interventions in their streetscape as a means to draw visitors into the community and start important dialogues to address prejudices against such marginalized communities and their residents. I will be carrying out the project in collaboration with Adhyayan, a community driven NGO focused on empowering youths from marginalized communities by teaching them valuable skills and resources that are otherwise denied by social, economic and cultural circumstances.
Existing as agricultural villages previously, and then subjected to different municipal laws, urban villages share an uncomfortable relation with the rest of the city that engulfed them in its rapid globalization. Today most urban villages in Delhi suffer from a lack of proper infrastructure, and the social and economic marginalization of their residents. A clear example of their exclusion from the urban discourse is the exclusion of their presence on Google maps in today’s tech-based world.
Working with Adhyayan and the youth of the village, I hope to facilitate the process of the residents coming to understand their role and status in the city, and raising their understanding of themselves as active agents. The project will be split into 3 phases – design charrettes and mapping exercises, installation creation, and pop-up performances within the village, with the goal to have the residents open up their community to outsiders. Limiting my role to instigating and facilitating the ideas, the project process will be self-driven by the students, teaching them skills in organization, collaboration, and management of resources among others. This summer the village children become the hosts and ambassadors of their village to create a “secrets” map of their village. The main aim will be to target perceptions of discomfort and hostility through navigation of socially different spaces for an outsider, thereby affecting their interactions with the locals in that place.
– Zoya Puri
Diving Into Legal Design
This summer, I’ll be diving into an exciting new space: the intersection between design and the legal system. I’m working with the NuLawLab, Northeastern University School of Law’s resident innovation hub, to look at how design can be used to create a legal system that works better for people. What if we could use human-centered design to build a legal landscape more responsive to community needs, more engaging, and more empowering – where everyone has access to justice?
I know you’re likely wondering – well, what does that look like? While the design x law space is emerging, there are a bunch of projects that show the potential for new approaches to transform how we interact with the law. Take in a preview of the NuLawLab’s first project, led by socially engaged art studio REV-, which uses mobile technology to connect with domestic workers:
Margaret Hagan, a fellow at Stanford’s d.school and creator of the new Program for Legal Tech + Design, has illustrated a clear breakdown of how different types of design can interact with the law:
My summer will be spent exploring the possibilities for what legal design could look like in the context of Rhode Island. While learning from the NuLawLab’s design-oriented approach, I will be working to support the current efforts by the law firm DeLuca and Weizenbaum to create a new center for public interest law in the state, in coordination with Roger Williams University School of Law. It’s exciting to be joining this work at such a formative time in the development of the new law center. My work will be based in immersive local research and will involve 1) using design to communicate legal needs, and 2) exploring what kinds of solutions could meet those needs. More to come!
-Allison Wong
Too 3D
Mariya Sitnova
I will be spending my summer in Washington D.C. at the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian X 3D initiative. By 3D scanning their collections, museums can now make historical objects available to the public for access by people who cannot visit them in person or educators wanting to delve into new resources.
I will be working with museum educators, K-12 teachers, and 3D digitization technicians to design learning modules for these growing virtual collections through technologies like 3D printing. Examples of these modules include the iBook the Smithsonian intends to publish to demystify 3D technology through a historical inquiry of Abraham Lincoln, as well as a framework for case studies that will serve as the road map for reconstructing historical inventions.
The Lincoln life-mask was one of the first objects 3D scanned and included in the Beta Smithsonian X 3D Explorer.
The Story of Gender … Our final blog post.
It has been over a month now since Nupur and I left Delhi. The distance of time and space has given us the opportunity to really reflect on the project – the decisions that we made, where we succeeded, where we failed and what we finally achieved.
Initially, we were motivated by the gang rape of a woman that took place on 16 December 2012 in Delhi. We were also motivated by the mass activism and dialogue that ensued as a result of the rape. Nupur and I were determined to be part of it. We wanted our work to contribute to the dialogue and we wanted to create work that was truly meaningful. We left for Delhi inspired and motivated.
And when we got there we very quickly realized that making work that meaningfully responded to sexual violence was a lot more complicated than we had anticipated. Making this sort of work required a deep understanding of the underpinning complexities. If the work was to be really meaningful it had to consider amongst many things class, caste, tradition, religion, family, patriarchy, masculinity, femininity, social norms, education, cultural norms and so forth.
Through the Integrated Development Education Association (IDEA) NGO we met journalists, activists and NGO representatives working on human rights, masculinities, sexuality education and gender. These meetings reinforced our insight about the complexities involved. And with each meeting, the ideas that we had for our project became more and more daunting and overwhelming.
Then something happened. As we considered all these terms and constructs (social norms, masculinity, caste, etc) they started to flatten, their meanings started to collapse. They started to appear as forces in themselves as though they weren’t linked to or about people. I don’t think at the time we really articulated this ‘flatness’ of the terms but it is only now in hindsight that we are able to express that this is what we were responding to.
On reflection, we think it was this ‘flatness’ that was the catalyst in helping us define what the project was going to be about. We knew it was not going to be about finding solutions. And we knew it was not going to be about demonstrating our understanding of the underpinning drivers of sexual violence. What we wanted was for the project to be a record of how the complexities of gender (a complexity that underpins sexual violence) had been internalized in men and women’s lives. We wanted the record to act as an accurate reflection of who we are as a collective.
We decided then that we were just going to listen, record and discover.
So we started collecting stories from men and women within the urban middle class of Delhi. The narratives we collected were not opinions or analysis or ideas about gender, they were stories and memories about lived experiences that contributed to the constructions of gender.
We collected stories from men and women from the urban middle class. We decided on the urban middle class for a number of reasons, the primary reasons being that although sexual violence occurred across class and caste, the responses to it were primarily targeted towards people in the lower classes. And given the short amount of time and limited resources we decided to reach out to communities that we were able to access with reasonable ease. We hope in the future to broaden our scope of focus to reach across India and beyond.
When we started to log the stories we were collecting, we continuously bumped against the terms and constructs that overwhelmed us initially. Except now they had a particular dimension that we could see and understand; they were now attached to people and their values, hopes and anxieties.
We then decided to edit the stories into 1 – 1.5 minute mini narratives. We mapped these mini-narratives along certain threads and themes. By doing so we were able to illustrate how certain abstractions are reified and experienced. For example when we looked at the idea of protection, we found that men were encouraged to assume the role of the protector of women (sisters, mothers, daughters, Aunts) and women are encouraged to assume that they needed to be protected by men. This idea is reflected in individual behaviours, in social constructions and even at the institutional level (an example of this is in an earlier post where I wrote about the Women’s Only car on the Delhi subway). So in mapping the mini-narratives along themes like ‘protection’ the listener can hear how protection is experienced from various perspectives: enforcement, reception, and observation.
We will be developing an online platform to act as a repository for these mini narratives. We will meta-tag the mini narratives in a number of ways to allow the listener to curate them so that they get only the stories that they want to hear. For instance if they would like to hear a seamless stream of stories across age groups and genders along a specific theme, they will be able to get it. An example of this is if the listener would like to only hear about the first sexual experience of women and men aged 28 that is what will be played to them. The listener will have the opportunity to save what they curated so others have a chance to listen to it as well. The online platform will also give the listener the opportunity to contribute to the repository of mini-narratives so that their lived experiences can be heard alongside those of others.
We believe that when experienced as a whole, the repository of stories will show us the ways in which we have come to internalize constructions of gender with both harmful as well as beautiful consequences.
We are very keen to expand the collection of stories in the repository so that they are more reflective of the diversity of India. Additionally, our aim is to continue to collect stories, but to reach beyond India into other cultures and regions around the world.
ADDA BAAZI. PUBLIC ART
We new that the collection of stories and the construction of an online repository for the stories would be a long-term endeavour and we wanted to do something as well that was a little more immediate and that referenced our observations.
One of our observations (as mentioned in an earlier post) is that we felt that men largely occupy the public spaces in Delhi. We saw men hanging-out on the streets together chatting, drinking tea, and watching the street. We rarely saw women doing the same. The women we saw appeared to be heading to a destination, they appeared to always be en-route to somewhere else and we seldom saw them ‘hanging-out’ or drinking a tea or having a chat on the street.
So we decided that our intervention would be a comment (or gentle confrontation) of what we saw as the male public face of Delhi. We photographed women in the middle of innocuous gestures and pasted these photographs in predominantly male dominated spaces in a particular neighbourhood of Delhi. We named this project Adda Baazi which when translated from Hindi means making a habit of hanging out.
The responses to our intervention were really affirming. A number of people (both men and women) felt that we were bringing to attention a norm that they hadn’t noticed. The most affirming response we received was from a group of young women who upon looking at the documentation of the intervention, went to a male dominated teashop and sat down and had tea. They felt supported in doing so.
We have created a website for our final report for the Maharam Fellowship. We will share that with you shortly.
Nupur and Bathsheba.
Catch-up Post: The Planning Party
Hive Colab is the name of the office I worked at during the whole two months in Kampala. It’s a tech collaboration hub founded by one of my fellowship advisors, TMS or Teddy Ruge. As seen in the photo, it’s set up as a large open space with islets of desks spread throughout. It’s such a great space to work in because you never know who is going to drop in from which country, who you’re going to work with, and what projects you might discover. My colleagues range from coding nerds to serial entrepreneurs to mobile app gurus. A few weeks in, I found out that one of the creators of Winsenga, an award winning ultrasound app, was sitting at the desk just across me. The team, originally from Makerere University, had created this app to help reduce maternal mortality rates and most recently was awarded $50,000 by Microsoft. In the corner desks by the window sits my friend Anne Giuthu. She started a business in her early 20s, had it acquired by another company, is CEO of her second marketing company now, is deputy director of the marketing department at a university, and is a mother of one. Oh and she’s also only 25 years old.
Being at this space is how I easily got connected to my research partner, Joseph Wanda, pictured below. He doesn’t like having his photo taken so this is all you’re going to get.
Joseph diligently taking notes in preparation for some epic field research.
He is serial researcher, having conducted all kinds of research for companies and universities, including Hive Colab. Once he came on board my research became a lot more concrete. I could finally determine what specific areas to sample around Uganda since Joseph knew the geography a lot better than me. Over the course of one week, we established a tentative schedule for 3 weeks of field research ranging geographically from central Uganda (Kampala) to eastern Uganda (Jinja and Mbale*). Kampala was a good starting point because we were already there and familiar with the place. We also knew of which slums to visit and could navigate ourselves around them because Joseph had done prior research in them. Jinja and Mbale were more foreign places to both of us but we knew we had to get out of central Uganda. One of the big reasons was to see if areas that were less industrialized with less access to media would have different perceptions of how they were represented in western media, if at all. Jinja and Mbale were less industrialized cities, both with large slums and many local NGOs present.
The blue poster seen above, and pictured below as well, illustrates the brainstorming process of my field research objectives. They were:
- To understand if the poverty-porn-is-bad argument is valid.
- To better understand how ‘victims’ of poverty porn want to be represented.
- To understand the effects of poverty porn on people’s dignity/self-esteem
- To understand African misconceptions of the west.
The planning process was more about framing the issue of poverty porn rather than about the logistics of travel and appointments, although that was quite a challenge as well. Thanks to the generous wall space in my room and the pack of Super Sticky Post-its I brought from home, I was able to do some visual mapping of the underlying aspects of the issue. Many questions came up during this process. Is “poverty porn” even the right term? Who are the main constituents of NGOs? Is donor dependency okay? Do the ends justify the means? How does a stereotype come to be?
Current Status of Project
I am currently back in New York, still scrambling to write catch-up posts on this blog and keep you guys up to date. It’s been difficult coming back to this bustling city and trying to process the past two months of adventures. Bear with me as I try to present the meat of my project in the next few weeks before school starts.
The next few posts will tell the stories from each of our sites: Kampala, Jinja, and Mbale.
Stay tuned and cheers,
Leah
*Mbale is pronounced em-balleh just fyi.
Catch-up Post: Don’t Pity the African Boy Without Pants
I grew up joining in on clothing drive efforts at school, advertising to students to bring in their old clothes to donate to poor kids on the other side of the world. I also grew up seeing lots of NGO campaign photos of African babies without much or any clothes on. And so I automatically equated little or no clothes to poverty. However, this long-held notion of mine was challenged when I talked to the manager of the Kireka Rehabilitation Center near the Banda Slums of Kampala. Miriam Akot, pictured below, was an energetic interviewee and had lots to say about poverty porn.
Miriam Akot, Manager of Kireka Rehabilitation Center and a positively sassy lady who believes Africa needs opportunities for industry development and ownership as well as individual skill development to maintain those industries without permanent foreign help.
Our interview turned into a conversation and soon we were talking very honestly and openly – so much so that we began talking about male genitalia. She made me stop the audio recorder and began talking about how there is a very good reason why some boys we see in the slums or elsewhere don’t wear pants. It’s not because they’re poor and can’t afford them. No. It’s because the lack of pants, or any kind of restrictive article of clothing for that matter, allows for the proper development of the kid’s “male parts.”
Oh.
Wow.
I was mind-blown. Not only because we were having a much too lengthy conversation about penises and what not, but also because of the fact that I had realized what a seemingly small piece of local knowledge could do to change a long-held misconception around. This is not to desensitize anybody about poverty and down play the fact that there are definitely children who cannot afford proper clothes or any at all. But what this conversation taught me was two things – 1) that understanding the local context was important and 2) a photograph can’t always capture that local context.
When we see photos of poverty, we need to know that they’re photos of poverty because somebody behind the camera framed it that way. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not. Even if it’s a seemingly candid photo, the decision to wait and take a photo at a certain point of the person’s state is in itself a conscious artistic decision to achieve a certain result. I’m not saying that photographers are evil and manipulative, but only that there is a depth and diversity of narratives that can go missing if we rely on just one person’s original news caption.
Cheers,
Leah
India Project – Progress and Updates
BLOG ENTRY 3
Nupur Mathur
New Delhi July 30th 2013
In the last post I had put down three possible directions we could possibly go in. Since then we’ve zeroed in what we will be doing here, if you scroll down you can read our project note. In all honesty the process of working out what we need to do has been a challenging one and we find ourselves wishing for 8 more weeks rather than the four we have left. That being said the next four weeks promise to be action packed.
Tattoo parlors like this are recent phenomenas
Observing emerging cultures
A STORY OF SEXUALITY (Title TBD)
Bathsheba Okwenje & Nupur Mathur
In collaboration with Pattie Gonsalves, IDEA | Supported by the RISD Maharam STEAM fellowship
Project Description:
The purpose of our project is to stimulate and sustain dialogue on issues relating to gender disparities that lead to problematic ideas about sexuality.
The project will draw from and represent real life accounts of instances in which men and women have been confronted with gender-specific assumptions in behavior and attitude in the context of sexuality. These experiences will include, but are not limited to the following:
- Ideas, expectations and behaviours related to masculinity.
- Ideas, expectations and behaviours related to femininity.
- Attitudes and assumptions surrounding the idea of service as an action of femininity.
- Attitudes and actions that contribute to the suppression of female sexual desires and the resulting behaviours.
- Assumptions, behaviours that are established as a result of a separation of the sexes and how this impacts the quality of relationships.
- Attitudes and judgements based on the way women / men represent themselves through clothing and / or adornment.
- Assumptions and actions that allow the public face of Delhi to be largely male.
Our aim is to illustrate how our individual actions and attitudes, especially those that live in the everyday, contribute to and perpetuate a problematic system of assumptions in the context of sexuality.
Process:
Through a series of interviews, we will collect experiences from a diverse group of men and women within the urban middle / upper class in Delhi. The demographic will include young unmarried men and women, young married men and women, middle-aged married men and women, and senior citizens.
Treatment:
Personal intimate experiences in the form of anonymous, audio narratives will be layered with video footage that illustrates the day-to-day activities or actions in Delhi that contribute to assumptions around gender and sexuality.
Each video will be approximately 30 seconds to 1 min long.
For example:
Video: Inside a general store/chemist shop an over should shot shows a woman buying a packet of sanitary napkins that is put inside a black plastic bag and handed over to her. Other customers buy other products that are given in regular transparent plastic bags.
Audio: A man speaks about when he first heard of menstruation. He recounts a childhood memory from his school days when all the boys were asked to leave the class while the girls were being explained something in private.
PLAN ESTRATÉGICA NACIONAL DEL EXPORTACION
ELIZA SQUIBB : Shipibo Textiles: Creating economic viability and cultural visibility through craft.
July 18. After a breakfast of fried plantains, scrambled eggs and star fruit juice from the garden, I went with Adelina to a meeting in the cultural center in Pucallpa. There was a small exposition of paintings by Pucallpa natives, but the main event was a three hour lecture about exportation, complete with multiple powerpoint presentations to motivate inhabitants of the Ucayali region to start businesses. The audience of both men and women, including some Shipiba women in traditional dress were introduced to the “Plan Estratégica Nacional del Exportacion” PENX for short. The “X” was a good call on the part of the administration, or else the acronym would have signified something much less appropriate. There were some giggles when the audience noticed this letter choice, but the presenter bravely soldiered on.
While the talk about global market economies might have been important to give everyone a broader vision, the audience was very engaged and many people loudly requested sessiones de capacitacion, or actual business training sessions, pointing out that if this education wasn’t provided, they couldn’t afford to hire specialists. It seemed that people were more interested in learning the nitty gritty of how to run their own businesses rather than hearing about how hard it is to learn Chinese. Everyone went home with some nicely designed brochures, pretty posters about the Ucayali region’s exportation potential, a soda, and a chicken empanada.
In the case of Adelina, she has had some help with key aspects that helped her become the business woman that she is today, including a german volunteer who set up her website in multiple languages. But how do other artisans and business owners get this help? The most positive sign is how loudly people called for what they felt they needed most, hopefully the cultural center will take the hint and deliver more useful information with the chicken empanada next time.
Adelina’s cooperative: Ronin Kate: http://www.ronin-kate.com/english-1/
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