Week 26 - Evaluating & resolving details

Now that I have a clearer idea of how the installation will function I need to think about each section in detail. The first 3 sections will require user input so I want to do some user testing and see how people respond to them.

1. Stereotyping and testing unconscious bias

In order to get a deeper understanding of the stereotypes created within society I asked my friends to get involved with a brainstorming session and send me as many stereotypes as they could think of. This helped me understand the preconceived perceptions people may have against others in society and allowed me to create user personas.

Sketching exploration

For the first section of the installation I want the users to match up words with the personas. I had a think about the physical characteristics of each person and what you can see just from looking at them. I wanted to have a mix of race, gender, physique and hair styles etc.

After asking some of my friends advice for how I could stereotype these people the feedback I got was to do a combination of people wearing clothes, underwear and then some naked. This changed the dynamic and made it easier for people to stereotypes and develop opinions on people based on clothing choice etc.

Associated words

I then had a think about what words could be used to describe the persona's. The words included job titles, marital status, health struggles and negative labels. The words in dark blue are job titles, the purple words describe an aspect of the person's life and the light blue words as negative labels.

User testing & feedback

Once I had drawn out the people I asked my family potential questions about them and got them to point out who they thought the answer applied to. This was a good way to test unconscious bias against the personas.

I got all 4 of my family member involved I asked them for feedback and things I could change moving forward. This is where it was suggested that some of the persona's should have clothes on and others should be naked. This adds a different dynamic and to the user it expands the potential of more stereotypes.

I sent a draft example of this section of the installation to my friends as a way to determine how well it worked. I asked them to choose two words that could be used to describe the persona, the words had to be different colours and they could not use the same word for more than one person.

This was a good way to show the presence of unconscious bias within society as they were judging and stereotyping the personas based on physical characteristics. A few of them commented that there were a lot of harsh words or negative labels but what they did not seem to realise was that I never explicitly asked them to use any of the negative labels (words in light blue).

After asking my friends to give each person two words that could describe them some reoccurring stereotypes started to emerge. Everyone thought that the first person was the teacher and either married/pregnant/parent, this suggests that people associate women wearing glasses and modest clothing to be family orientated or working with children. Despite participants being told they did not have to use ALL of the words (only 2 per person, leaving the 10 negative words left), every single person used a negative label at least once to describe a persona. Four out of the five participants used negative labels on at least half of the persona's.

Doing this exercise with participants highlighted that when people are under pressure and asked to describe someone their unconscious bias becomes apparent. Having an unconscious bias is not necessarily a bad thing but what I wanted to do was draw attention to people's dismissive internalised behaviours. Stereotyping can be hurtful and quite often inaccurate. Even if the stereotype is correct in some cases, constantly putting someone down based on your preconceived perceptions will not encourage them to succeed.

2. Societal Bias

Show the presence of sexism in the media and highlight the over sexualisation of women.

I gathered a selection of controversial adverts that sexually objectify women and show the presence of sexism and how women are portrayed in the media. I sent them to my friends in order to get a better understanding of how sexist and degrading they deemed them to be.

I then thought about the option of getting users to guess what certain images were trying to sell. There's 3 images per section and 8 sections in total, all of the images in the same section are selling the same product. The point I am trying to get across is that women are sexually objectified in the media, their bodies are often used to sell a product that has nothing to do with women in particular or their bodies. I just typed in 'sexist car ad' for example, I didn't specifically or deliberately search for women.

This doesn’t mean that men are never ever the culprit of sexism in the media however the sexual objectification or portrayal of a man in a non-professional light is less potent. It’s an undeniable truth that such examples of the sexualization and objectification of men are much fewer and farther between than those involving women. There are clear reasons to logically conclude that this is an issue affecting women disproportionately.

This was a really fun and engaging way to get people involved with my project. Most people thought that the images were relating to some sort of beauty products, underwear or porn. It was a good way to learn about what people thought of the images and it was interesting to hear their reactions when they found out what the images are actually selling. User engagement is a great way to get people involved and enthusiastic about the project. Asking people questions about what is in front of them allows them to think deeper about what they are seeing and forces them to question it.

3. Education - Allport Scale

The Allport Scale is a measure of the manifestation of prejudice in a society. It was devised by psychologist Gordon Allport in 1954, it was created in the context of explaining how smaller behaviours, built up into what eventually became the extermination of the Jews and other minority groups during the Holocaust.

Incorporating the Allport Scale into the installation shows people how something like verbal sexual harassment including sexist comments and gossiping can escalate and ultimately lead to worse forms of sexual attacks such as assault, rape and even murder.

Users are to move the words into the triangle in the correct format, getting the users involved with a challenge engages them and makes them understand the scale better as opposed to just looking at it.

I explained what the Allport's Scale was to my friends and sent them the diagram blank with the words surrounding it. I asked them to fill out what they thought would be in each section as a way to make them think about how prejudice manifests in society.

4. The Problem - Sexism

This is the biggest section of the installation and for me - the most important. Initially I wanted to design an interactive installation solely focussed on educating the user about sexual harassment. As the process went on I began to discover that it is much easier to help people understand when they are fully engaged in the experience. Having 3 smaller 'fun' sections leading up to the main one allows the user time to get immersed in the experience and therefore take in as much of the information as possible.

For this section of the installation I want to use the Allport scale as a reference to visually represent all of the data I had gathered. I wanted a section of the installation dedicated to the facts and statistics that I have come across over the course of my personal honours project. I want to incorporate visually represented data and graphics as a way to engage the reader. I thought the Allport Scale was a good structure to follow as it categorises all aspects of sexism in a hierarchical order and makes it easy for the user follow.

I went through all of the research I had done over the course of fourth year and picked out the data that I felt needed to be discussed and drawn attention to. I wrote down all the facts and statistics that related to each relevant section and filtered through the ones I wanted to keep as part of the installation.

Once I had enough information for each section I made an infographic containing all the facts and included visuals to make it more appealing.

5. Solution

What causes it and how can we prevent it?

For the final section of the installation I wanted to look at a variety of potential factors that cause sexism. There are an infinite amount of potential reasons as to why sexism is so prevalent in modern society but I comprised 9 factors that I believe have a significant impact.

I also wanted to include a section that concludes the research I gathered and provide ways in which we can work together to try and break the pernicious cycle of gender discrimination.

Dimensions of installation

There will be five sections of the installation, each section will have an A1 sized board that contains information and interaction for that section. The A1 boards will be supported with a wooden structure 80cm wide and 1.8m in height. The A1 boards will be 62cm off the ground.

The installation will be made up of five sections all joined together, adding up to 4m in length and 1.8m height.

Draft great images

I experimented with a couple of potential layout options so I could get a better idea of how it could look in a working environment.

Next steps:

• Create wooden structure

• Adjust and format A1 posters

• Finalise details and use the same illustrative graphic style for each section

• Storyboard each section of the installation and giving a clear narrative of how it works