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Women Safety (NL)

Team

Akarsh Sanghi

Interaction Designer, Developer

akarsh.sanghi@gmail.com
Laura Mul

Researcher

lauramul21@gmail.com
Shinichiro Ito

Creative Technologist, Media Producer

shinichiro.shin1ro@gmail.com

Commissioner:

Description

First visit Cisco (September 11)

IMG_2720This afternoon we visited the Cisco office. We took the tram to Bullewijk where the office is situated. The first impression was that it was like a real neat office. People were wearing suits and it looked like people were doing some serious business.

We got our badges and Jan Roggeveen (Bussiness development manager) took us to the meeting room. We started discussing general information about Cisco. Jan talked about how everything can be connected by their devices and through internet. We talked about smart buildings in which light bulbs are connected to the network, so they can be easily maintained. This was the more general information, but after that we focused more on safety. Jan told us about new systems that would enable people to report crimes digitally. Someone could visit a building with a screen and talk to a police officer through this. This would cost less money due to the fact that the police officers are all situated in one place, so they can work efficiently. This might be interested for our project, only we want to avoid the crime. We will not be focusing on reporting the crime. Again, there will be some stuff that we can get out of this. Especially, the fact that it is place independent is interesting for us. We actually need something that is place independent. The device we will make should work everywhere.

There was a thing that Jan said which might be interested for our project. He talked about feedback and how something can eventually become a working system. If you keep on giving feedback, you can start data mining. So if you gather enough information about somethings behavior, you can predict this behavior.IMG_2670

After this, we talked about the environment and how it can influence safety. The thing which popped up into my head was that this will not be applicable everywhere. Of course the lighting will influence the feeling of safety, but this means that we will have to change the environment everywhere, which will not be as effective as making a device that a woman can carry with her.

This brings us to the next issue which we still have to investigate. Jan talked about how feeling safety is a difficult thing to use in our project. How do we know if someone is feeling safe? The only way to find out is to ask people.

We then talked about a possible solution. (We don’t know if we will be using this, but it is just an idea) Everyone has a mobile phone these days which is usable when we make something to save women. They will be more willing to use an application on their phone than another extra device. This way, we use what we already have by using new software. Another idea is that it can be based on, for example, the heartbeat of a woman and this again can be connected to the phone.

IMG_2703To conclude, it was a very interesting meeting in which we also got to see the telepresence room which we can use to talk to India. Cisco is willing to help us and we think that gives us more opportunities and ideas.

 

 

 

 

Week 1 (September 2-9)

The kickoff
DSC_3708

The first week of MediaLAB Amsterdam entailed a lot of fun activities in which we got to know each other and learned a lot about various topics. We got to know more about design, blogging and MakeyMakey, which will be useful during the development of our project. Our project will be on the safety of women in public spaces in Amsterdam. We will be working together with a team in Bangalore, India which will do the same project simultaneously. So it will be mirrored projects in different cities. The expectation is that the two cities will give different results in the end.

The user scene

First of all, we started with determining our user scene, which will involve various stakeholders. The most important one is the woman, but the environment, surrounding people and emergency response should also be taken into consideration. In order to understand safety better, we decided to look closer into what dangerous situations a woman can be. That is why we made this list in which situations are ranked from less dangerous to more dangerous.

  1. Staring
  2. Commenting
  3. Following
    ——–
  4. Physical molestation
  5. Physical harm when snatching bags

In Holland, most of the people have some experiences of being followed or passing comments. It doesn’t happen often that you hear stories about rape. Although this is the perception, there are some shocking figures to be found in the newspapers. The Volkskrant states that in Amsterdam there are 2 people every day that are being sexually abused. One out of three abuses, consists of rape. This mostly happens in Bijlmermeer and Slotervaart which are the suburbs of Amsterdam. Although this is shocking, we decided to focus on the first three points in our list. We will do more research on this later, but for now we will focus on the first three points of our list. This is due to the fact that most abuses take place in domestic scenes. This is not what we focus on, since we are interested in public space. So we did not take the more serious abuses into account when we shot our video.

The video

The video which we made depicts the user scene. It shows the daily routine of a woman during which she encounters some dangers. First of all, she is being looked at and screamed at. Second, she is being followed and in the end she tells her friend that she doesn’t feel safe enough to go to the park at night. This is how we tried to show that it is more about the feeling of safety in Amsterdam than actual harassment. The interview with the woman in the end (only to be found on the MediaLAB website due to privacy issues) again illustrates how women feel in Amsterdam.