Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Q&A – Doing Equity

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:10:05 GMT

Q&A from the session Doing Equity – Tools for Making Diversity, Equity and Inclusion more...Inclusive with Peter Bilak (Typotheque), Caroline Bollen (TU Delft) and Dr. Nighat Arif (BBC, NHS)

Dr. Nighat Arif - Treating Women Where They Are

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:09:48 GMT

“What happens when you don’t have the words to describe the symptoms?”

In the last installment of the ‘Doing Equity’ session, Dr. Nighat Arif, the resident doctor of BBC and ITV presents an uplifting talk that reiterates the importance of raising awareness and in normalizing discussions of female health within the Black and Asian communities in the UK. From menstruation to menopause as well as breast cancer – she states that there are still a lot of stigmas and shame attached to talking about these health concerns. Which is made even more complicated with the language boundaries as well as the unavailability of words in the different ethnic languages.

“Why is that women who look like me and sound like me are not being listened to?”

When she gets together with women from these communities, such as at a mosque, she often hears stories about how doctors assume that menopausal symptoms don’t apply to them. Specifically, the mental symptoms of menopause – such as brain fogs, being forgetful, etc.- are often ignored and the women are given antidepressants instead.

So how does one address this gap of knowledge in female health that exists not only in the Asian and black communities in the UK, but also in other cultures in the world? What steps can one take to normalize this important discussion in inclusive ways? One of Dr. Nighat Arif’s creative answers to this is through her use of TikTok alongside the use of memes and gifs to reach out, educate, and engage in not just English, but also Urdu and Punjabi.

Caroline Bollen – Design With and For Empathy

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:09:12 GMT

“Empathy is the balance between identification and differentiation”

In this session ‘Doing Equity’, we dive into the aspects and practices that can be adopted in order to materialize equity in different settings. An interdisciplinary researcher at Delft University of Technology, Caroline Bollen whose research focus revolves around how to best understand empathy in a society where communication is more and more mediated by technologies.

Through dissecting what empathy connotes in multiple definitions, we find ourselves in her conceptualization of empathy which oscillates in a state of balancing identification and differences. She further explains that as a society, we have the tendency to reduce empathy to certain social, narrow norms, such as good or bad.

Utilizing Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole’ subreddit as an example of how technology can be used to facilitate collective constructive feedback, it gives the chance for users to connect, empathize, and imagine themselves in the shoes of others.

“Communication technology is like meta-empathy.”

Peter Bilak - Giving Voice to People

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:08:45 GMT

“I wish there were governments who paid for this”

Peter Bil'ak is a well-known name within the narrow field of typography and type design. Having worked for many years digiitising handwritten scripts from South Asian regions, he shares some of the implications of digitally missing and incomplete alphabets. While the global population is growing very quickly, the number of spoken languages is simultaneously shrinking. As education and other systems become standardised, languages that aren’t even properly documented don’t stand a chance.

With examples from both India and indigenous Canadian societies, Bilak explains how linguists and designers need to leverage technology if we want to be able to save some of these languages and scripts. Because if they disappear we risk losing a lot of localised knowledge. In Canada, Syllabics include a group of 40 different languages. Several of them are incomplete on computers, meaning some people cannot even spell their names. And in India… no one even knows how many languages there are in total.

Optimisation of font software and the Unicode framework are vital for these marginalised languages. Working with the community is the only way to make things happen, says Bilak. One such result is the November Type System: a versatile and accessible collection of fonts based on the needs of readers of hundreds of languages in South Asia.