SOCIETY AGAINST VIOLENCE & ABUSE
(Critical Design Research Project)
PROJECT BRIEF
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion, without the discomfort of thought”. The critical and speculative design process confronts traditional design practices in the 21st century. Traditional design practice tends to assume things based on certain preconceived ideologies and notions and these ideologies and notions form the foundation for a project.
Designers tend to forget the one thing that differentiates them from other professions; is the ability to empathize while figuring out solutions to a problem. Most often the problem-solving process tends to get messy and most solutions are shaped by resource constraints and preconceived beliefs and hence the end solutions are not often the best solutions but are more likely the ones that support the powerful and the majority in society.
Conventional design practices are often socially and politically constrained to be on par with the existing social and cultural stigma in society. The conventional design practices give privilege and power to designers, leading to radically narrowing the potential for innovation because it forces designers to take a social/political stance.
While designing a solution it’s important to break down all social, cultural, and political barriers and think critically without biases or assumptions. Critical design is research through a design methodology that foregrounds the ethics of design practice, reveals potentially hidden agendas and values, and explores alternative design values.
PROJECT INTRODUCTION
A team of 5 people including me took up the initiative to work on a project applying critical research concepts. The project focuses on SAVA - Society against violence and abuse. In our society, violence, and abuse are surfacing in old and new ways. Violence against women and girls is the most prominent, however, less powerful men, people of alternative sexualities and genders also face this. It is present almost everywhere, within our houses, and outside.
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To tackle problems such as Violence and Abuse in society, it’s important to think and look at the problem through a critical lens. We spent 2 weeks understanding critical thinking and critical research by reading and critiquing various Critical theories and constant discussion amongst us. In the below paragraphs I would be sharing my journey of understanding Critical design and how we as a team applied critical thinking to curb violence and abuse in our society
UNDERSTANDING CRITICAL DESIGN
We started the project by understanding the importance of critical design and critical research and further read and critiqued works and theories of three famous critical theorists. Critical design takes a critical theory-based approach to design. This kind of design uses design fiction and speculative design proposals to challenge assumptions and conceptions about the role objects play in everyday life.
It is mainly used to share a critical perspective or inspire debate while increasing awareness of social, cultural, or ethical issues in the eyes of the public. To understand critical design better, it was important to understand the basic critical concepts first. As a group, we looked in detail at the works of three famous theorists namely, Bordieu, Foucault, and Habermas.
FEW THEORIES WE RESEARCHED
PIERRE BOURDIEU
Economic Capital: It refers to the economic power of a person. It is the amount of cash, property, land one possesses.
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Cultural Capital: Bourdieu believed Cultural capital is an important factor for the social inequality that exists in our society. Cultural capital is divided into three subcategories; Embodied, objectified and Institutionalised.
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Social capital: is the property of an individual, based on their collective, derived primarily from one's social position and status.
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Symbolic capital: is earned on an individual basis and may fluctuate widely between members in a community, An actor may possess a great degree of symbolic capital while isolating themselves from the community, resulting in a low level of social capital, or vice versa.
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Habitus : It is the physical embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our lives experience.
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MICHEL FOUCAULT
Self-emancipation: Emancipation is a legitimate human interest. It may be said that Foucault in his last works is concerned with putting forward a strategy for emancipation. The strategy consists of an aesthetic construction of the self. It is argued that this strategy ultimately fails and that, instead of retreating to the self, we need to return to the community level and to examine the rules of discourse that operate there.
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Discourse: Discourse is an institutionalized way of speaking or writing about the reality that defines what can be intelligibly thought and said about the world and what cannot. Discourse is an intersubjective phenomenon in which a speaker intends to influence the hearer.
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Discourse theory: is concerned with human expressions, often in the form of language. It highlights how such expressions are linked to human knowledge. It is concerned with questions of power and often with the question of institutional hierarchies.
POWER AND DISCIPLINE
Archaeology and Genealogy of knowledge: Michel Foucault Explains how the careful study of discursive traces left in the past would to help to understand the processes that have led to what we are today. He also talks about how knowledge is conditioned by exercising power through, “Regimes of Truth”.
Michel Foucault was one of the early theorists to believe through power is achieved through knowledge and not the capital one posses. The genealogical analysis aims to show how a given system of thought (a discursive formation) is the result of contingent events of history and not the outcome of rationally inevitable trends.
Discipline and panopticon surveillance: Discipline is a mechanism of power that regulates the thought and behavior of social actors through subtle means. Panopticon is a metaphor for the operation of power and surveillance in contemporary society.
JURGEN HABERMAS
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. Some important concepts in Habermas’ work are cognitive interests, communicative action, lifeworld, and system
LOOKING AT VIOLENCE AND ABUSE IN SOCIETY THROUGH THE LENSE OF CRITICAL THORIES
We as a group understood and critiqued these theories through intense discussions. It took us over a week to understand these concepts since we were completely new to them. At the end of one week, we had a pretty clear idea about all the theories and the works of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Habermas.
As designers, we understood the importance of critical theories and how applying critical design, could help us fight violence and abuse that exist in society.Critical Research consists of three main elements; Insight, Critique, and Transformation. 5 Insight: Concerned with interpretation and gaining insights.
Hermeneutics
is the theory and methodology of interpretations. It is the art of understanding and making oneself understood. It goes beyond logical analysis and interpretative principles.
Critique
It is concerned with critique/ genealogy of knowledge, Social practice of control and reproduction, and power structures that lie behind accepted interpretations.
Transformation
Improvements to the conditions of human existence, existing social arrangements, and social theories based on insight and critique.
BOURDIEU
argued that a person’s strength/power is directly proportional to the amount of capital one has. Social capital is one main reason for the existence of inequality in society. Violence and abuse against women by men are because of the social conditioning of men in society.
Since the beginning of the age, men always had ownership of land, wealth, and titles. With men being in possession of all this capital, it naturally gives them more power and authority in society, causing gender inequality. Culture affects our worldview and preferences are determined by our social positions.
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Patriarchy has been existing in our society for years now and it's natural for it to be passed on from generation to generation when it does we accept it and do not question its existence. Bourdieu's line of work always aims at building responsive strategies to existing systems instead of building shiny new ones, which led us to questioning how does "molding the psyche" exactly help in transformation and eliminating V and A, what are the existing systems that work towards eliminating violence and abuse and how do we work on transformation based on our value stance?
FOUCAULT
Looking at the discursive traces of the past, we learned how the notion of patriarchy has been existing since the beginning of the age, and the result (the society that we live in right now) is because of the social and cultural reproduction of values. Changes in society are mostly determined by people who hold power, only because their socio-cultural capital is valued more than others. As a result of this, it becomes extremely difficult for women to fight gender inequality.
Power structures in society get reproduced through generations, so as designers we understood it's important to break the chain and concentrate on the root cause of the problem.
As socially constructed identities, boys and men learn “appropriate” gender roles in accordance to the masculine expectations of their given society.” Though society doesn’t ask or expect men to abuse or harm women in any way, it promotes violence and aggression as the main characteristic of men. Men are hardwired to be nonsensitive and strong and this leads to piling up of emotions in men.
Suppressed emotions and society's expectation of men, lead to the development of anger, which is expressed through violence. “Gender plays an often hidden but highly important role in men’s lives, and that man can play a vital role in addressing inequality and violence”
DETAILING RESEARCH FINDINGS
We further took critical research to narrow down on a few specific areas under the topic; Society against violence and abuse. We discussed and divided SAVA into three subcategories.
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Role of Internet or media as a safe space and the flip sides of it for women Understanding social reproduction. Where do social and cultural values originate from?
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History of Violence and Abuse.
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Necessity for power structures, understanding their reproduction and how they can be broken.
Role of Internet or media as a safe space and the flip sides of it for women
We understood that whatever happens on social media/ online platforms is just the reflection of people who they are in real life.
Twitter was envisioned to be a space where marginalized populations, including women, Dalits, and religious minorities, would have an equal opportunity to make their voices heard. Many women do not believe so.
Every day, women on Twitter face a barrage of abuse: from racist and sexist attacks to rape and death threats. Online abuse has the power to belittle, demean, intimidate and eventually silence women. Social media is a platform that allows people to express their thoughts freely, but women get abused and harassed for speaking anything controversial.
Patriarchy has cast a shadow even on social media, where women are trolled and insulted and are brought down by powerful men.
Understanding social reproduction; Closer look at history of Violence and Abuse
The idea of patriarchy and women being subordinate to men has existed in our society for centuries now. In Christianity, the Hebrew Bible's version of Genesis explicates the way women are considered as the weak, lustful, and easily deceivable gender and hence have to subjugate themselves to men, the superior wise gender.
The light was thrown on the idea of women in this manner based on the famous story of how the snake easily deceived Eve, the firstborn woman, and how Eve convinced Adam in sinning.
Similar cultural literature from various religions paved the way to the reproduction of socio-cultural values, which established the idea that "all women needed wise male counsel and careful male direction".
Religious and Cultural beliefs like these are the reason for the social and cultural reproduction of Patriarchy and violence & abuse.
Role of Internet or media as a safe space and the flip sides of it for women
We understood that whatever happens on social media/ online platforms is just the reflection of people who they are in real life.
Twitter was envisioned to be a space where marginalized populations, including women, Dalits, and religious minorities, would have an equal opportunity to make their voices heard. Many women do not believe so.
Every day, women on Twitter face a barrage of abuse: from racist and sexist attacks to rape and death threats. Online abuse has the power to belittle, demean, intimidate and eventually silence women. Social media is a platform that allows people to express their thoughts freely, but women get abused and harassed for speaking anything controversial.
Patriarchy has cast a shadow even on social media, where women are trolled and insulted and are brought down by powerful men.
MAVA- MEN AGAINST VIOLENCE AND ABUSE
We looked at an NGO named MAVA, to look into existing ways organizations fight the violence and abuse in society. MAVA stands for Men Against Violence and Abuse.
MAVA ( Men Against Violence and Abuse) is a non-profit organization that believes in the idea of sensitizing men as the key to tackling gender-based inequality and violence.
"MAVA has pioneered efforts in India to engage boys and men to address issues of gender inequality and discrimination by interrogating the existing dominant model of masculinity, and help prevent gender-based violence".
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BUILDING PERSPECTIVE ABOUT MAVA
Men are often overthrown by society for being sensitive or talking about feelings. Creating a society a judgement free space for men will help overcome this issue. Creating a space where men can comfortably be who they are, a space where they can be vulnerable and a space that facilitates better communication of this issue is equally necessary. As much as we appreciated
MAVA’s unique approach in tackling Violence and approach by sensitizing men, we critiqued few of their methods. We felt that, by focusing on only men and training them to better humans, it again reproduced patriarchy.
By focusing on only men, it again felt like MAVA are implying men to have the power to change the world and made it seem like all the efforts of women are not valued.
THE NEXT STEP; TRANSFORMATION
The next step of our critical research was the transformation process. We understood a lot about violence and abuse, when we looked at it from a critical perspective.
After clearly understanding the current problems in our society and introspecting the history of violence and abuse that has existed in our society, we felt we were ready to start ideating and coming up with transformative ideas. Few of the ideas we came up with are :
SOCIAL MEDIA ABUSE
With a rapid increase in Social media platforms and Users, Number of online sexual abuse and harassments are increasing.
We felt creating a safe space for people to express their thoughts freely is very important in the digital world that we live in.
CREATING A SOCIETAL CHANGE
To make individuals of dominant groups aware of how they take part in social reproduction when the exert power over oppressed groups unknowingly through everyday conversations and practices and make people have a verbally moral language.
To create discomfort in verbal abuse and have consequences so people won't proceed to physical, and be silent spectators if it is happening around them.
REVOLUTIONIZING PARENT
Parents play a huge role in upbringing their children. Parent's perspective of gender equality/ V and A, would directly reflect on their offspring's behavior : Making parents realize the importance of educating their kids about Gender equality and V&A
NARROWING DOWN OBJECTIVE
We understood that with the time frame we had, we had to narrow down our objectives and focus on one particular idea in detail. Even though we all felt, all the above objectives are important and there is a lot to work on them, we decided to choose on one objective and work on it further.
After a couple of calls and discussions, we decided to move forward with understanding more about online abuse and harassment because of the rapid increase in the number of online users and abuses.
As a group, we spent almost 2 weeks understanding different kinds of online abuses. It was quite surprising to realise how many different ways people get abused on social media. We looked at these various types of abuses and harassments and critically looked at it to find possible transformative ideas
FURTHER NARROWING DOWN OBJECTIVE
After gaining insights from critiquing and analyzing, we moved on to the next step of discussing possible transformative ideas. We came up with 4 transformative ideas and further listed down key pointers under those 4 ideas based on critical research concepts.
Regular sexual and verbal tests used for training in corporate workplace settings
Establishes a common ground for the discourse concerning expected workplace conduct Testing and analyzing their existing cultural capital/habitus making one aware of their personal prejudices that are otherwise nurtured by their habitus.
Modifying user profiles; to curb violence and abuse in social media.
Online identities that would morph themselves based on users' communication habits/ online behaviors creates the need for self surveillance as digital avatars would be visible to everyone and these identities would create impressions to others.
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Gamification, as a way to change the way social media might work,
Games and social media have a lot in common. Both are very addictive, both include exchange of opinion/words while using the platform and both provide chances of people to disobey the policies and break the code of conduct.
Hence, looking at existing game platforms and their methods to prevent abuses,cheat or harassment, could be applied on social platforms.
Modifying Reporting systems used on social media platforms.
Social media platforms hold a disproportionately large amount of all kinds of capital and hence, power resulting in social reproduction which is reflected in their reporting systems.Eg.
Instagram's censorship on women's nipples reproduces toxic patriarchal notions. Modifying the existing policies of social media platforms based on critical theories and not on ideologies that exist due to social or cultural reproduction.
REPORTING SYSTEMS USED ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
After discussing with HFI about our efforts and the ideas we had come up with, we were told to choose one from the four ideas and work on it. We agreed and decided to choose one of the 4 ideas and move forward with it.
We all had a group call and discussed that Reporting systems has a lot of scope for improvements and its a very crucial part of social media platforms. So, we decided to choose “reporting systems” as our main objective and started ideating more on it.
S.C.A.M.P.E.R
Our next step was brainstorming ideas on how to improve the reporting process on social media. We discussed and decided we had to choose a brainstorming method to come up with effective ideas.
We all chose to use the S.C.A.M.P.E.R method for brainstorming. Before we began to brainstorm ideas, we sent out a google survey to find out what are the most common problems users face and the survey helped us understand the problems users face and gave us clarity on what we had to focus on while coming up with solutions.
The survey even made us realise that instagram is the most used social platform, so we decided to choose instagram as the social media platform; to modify and improve.
FINALISING IDEA
After brainstorming and color coding, we realised we had a lot of ideas and we had to pick a few ideas that are practically possible and can be worked on, with the time frame we were provided. We decided as a group to pick three ideas from each category and we had 9 ideas in total at the end of the brainstorming session. We chose the 9 ideas based on critical theories and practicality.
FINAL IDEA
While discussing these ideas, We made sure to also look at how Instagram would benefit from these ideas. We didn't want to come up with ideas that couldn't actually be implemented. We knew Instagram is a corporate company and they looked at possible ways they could attract users and make money. So from the beginning we made sure our ideas help in making instagram a safer space and also profit Instagram.
Modify the account creation process, which would make users take the policies and code of conduct seriously
“SENSITIVE CONTENT” warning modification
Reverse reporting system by putting abuser through harrowing steps that usually abused person needs to.
Modifying reporting process via country / region so it can adhere differently to different regional language and regional slurs.
Eliminate the possibility for people with verified accounts or high social capital to benefit from reporting systems.
Modify the user's accessibility to certain features after being reported for a certain number of times.
MY PERSONAL REFLECTION ON THE PROJECT
As a practicing Human-Centered Designer, I would like to make the best use of technology to my advantage in creating solutions to the most simple yet significant problems we face in our daily lives. I would define myself as a designer who works on projects that are focused on a select target audience with a very specific goal set.
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Working on the pre-thesis project, made me realize the importance of designing for a mass audience. It was my first time working on a project without a specific target group and no specific expectations. The application of critical design in the project was a deviation from the design process I usually follow and made an impact on my workflow. Despite being a human-centered designer, I am expected to follow certain conventional design practices and meet expectations with the results I produce.
Yet, I believe that I could contribute to coming up with design solutions to problems that could make an impact in society. Working on projects not just for the sole purpose of profit but for making the world a better place would make me a better human as well as a designer.