List of interventions

These are some interventions that are either on going or that I plan to execute in the following months.

1. Collage intervention workshop with children (ages 6-9) in public Schools in Barcelona (Badalona) to co-create possible futures in terms of gender roles / stereotypes. I am interested in working with children looking at the possibility of designing prevention-based interventions and for this particular experiment just hearing what they have to say. If you want to look at the workshop plan, you can check this document out.

Before designing the intervention, we went out to public spaces in el Raval and Sant Martí. Here you can read some learnings about engaging safely with children in public spaces.

Some high level learnings from this first iteration:

Location preference: When engaging children in parks, it is hard to do so when they are currently playing since there are a lot of distractions in place. However, places of transit like streets or bus stops are not good because parents or teachers are more focused on mobility and getting their children safe and on time. Engaging teachers in public spaces is also not ideal since they are busy managing large groups of children and do not have the consent from the school or parents to agree to participate in the intervention. Larger groups in public spaces are also difficult to approach since they are focused on the school activity in hand. Street interventions also have a lot of elements of distraction so keeping activities short is essential.

Role of parents: Parents act as both translators and facilitators for the exercise (for kids under 6 years old). In some cases they would translate from Catalan and Italian and help us engage children. When parents are present, it is best to approach them first.

Consent forms and confidentiality: They didn’t ask for a consent form (even though we bought ones with us) and were ok with us participating as long as they mediated the exercise.

Correct age for intervention: While it was interesting to engage with parents and their young children, children under ages of 6 were too young for the type of reflections we needed. They only interpreted quite literally the images we showed them and had a difficult time building stories.This intervention in particular is most suited for children age 10 and above, they have greater critical thinking skills and can more easily make the connections between elements. We still have doubts regarding the artistic style / aesthetic style of the images and if words might be a better prompt.

Role of weather and chosen time/date: When weather is too cold, rainy or gray there are less children outside. This seems obvious but influences also the openness of parents and children to participate and engage.

The Futures workshop was held with 75 9 year-old children in Badalona. If you want to read more about the workshop, you can check this document out.

2. Futures literacy collage intervention with migrant women. We are mapping potential communities to engage with (Mamás que Leen, Open Cultural Center and Periferias Cimarronas). You can read our workshop plan here.

We started with the initial idea of using collage as a means to empower migrant women and explore futures literacy as a skillset that can be actively developed.

Finally we will be holding a workshop with Mamás que Leen in El Raval.

After feedback from faculty, we decided our engagement strategy would first be to have casual conversations with potential communities and organizations and then see which ones are relevant to work with and to generate trust for greater horizontality in the intervention.

We will be attending classes at Mamas que leen before implementing the workshop. Karin, the founder, suggested we incorporate vision boards as a tool for them to imagine their futures.

3. AI chatbot to help victims of IPV or potential aggressors to heal using GPT3. This would allow them to seek closure without having to literally contact their ex partner. You can look at our first prototype here and some initial learnings here. A shift I learned from the initial learnings was to focus this more on teaching others Non Violent Communication. However playing with the tool I learned that GPT3 is not the most suitable technology for teaching since it just rearranges information that the model is fed. This experiment is on hold.

4. Quick experiment to identify gender bias in synthetic realities using Midjourney. I inputted different phrases to explore if gender stereotypes emerged in the algorithmically generated images. Read about this quick research in this Medium article I wrote.

5. Experiment on salary negotiations for Latin American women. I’m interested in crowdsourcing salary information and combining that with GPT3 scripts to help women in corporate Latin America navigate salary negotiations to combat wage inequality. Here you can fill out a form with your salary raise story or read crowdsources stories here.

6. Micro digital storybooks for children to tackle specific issues. I am interested in exploring the format and also doing something that will force me to use illustration as a means of communication.

7. Some type of online glossary / thesaurus / A-Z on gender-related terminology that can be easily accesible. This one is very draft-y yet.

Want to explore more ideas? Check out my backlog below.