Research – Women Safety (NL)

Workshop on Design Research by Marco van Hout (September 18)

Conflicting concerns

This morning there was a workshop on Design Research. We started talking about conflicting concerns and how this appears almost in every design. So for example if you have a smartphone, it is great that you can contact a lot of people, but the problem is that you don’t look around you anymore. This comes with a lot of products. With our problem, the most difficult thing is that objective safety and subjective safety are sometimes conflicting. We should try to make people be safe and feel safe.

Research questions

After this, each group showed their research questions to each other. Our research questions were fine (Maybe because we already discussed it with Marco, hehe), but there was one thing that had to be changed. This used to be our main research question: What are the determinants that influence women’s feelings of unsafety in Amsterdam and what are factors that should be taken into account when designing interventions that can have a real impact? The problem with this question was, that we used the word determinants and factors, which makes it kind of weird. The factors are actually some of the determinants, so we should put it like this:

What are the determinants that influence women’s feelings of unsafety in Amsterdam and which of those should be taken into account when designing interventions to positively influence the unsafe feeling of women in Amsterdam?

Maybe this question will need some changes, but we will see that later.

Methods to use

The methods which Marco told us about were : 1. Design etnography (interview/observation) 2. Experience design (touch points) 3. Empathy (experience the same as the user) 4. Primary research (field research) 5. Secondary research (books)

Break up letters

This is all great, but Marco told us we should also do stuff like writing break up letters and bodystorming. Yes, that sounds weird, but those are innovative methods to get more creativity going on. We all wrote a break up letter for a product which we don’t like anymore. This way, you can easily find out what people think is wrong with the product and what used to be interesting. Here is one letter to my toilet that is flushed electronically:

Dear ‘maal’ toilet,

You have been making too much noise. I don’t understand you anymore, cause I can’t make something out of the noise you make. Also, sometimes you smell really bad. The other problem is that I often have to explain people how to treat you constantly, cause you are such a complex person. You make my life so difficult, when actually it should be easy. I will get someone new: someone who is easier to handle.

Goodbye, Laura

Bodystorming

This was fun. There was something more fun yet to come. We did a bodystorming session is which we showed a solution to the audience by demonstrating it. Shin was a superhero, Adwait was a dangerous person, Akarsh was the panic button and I was the user. You can fill in the rest for yourself..

Meeting with Koen ‘t Hof (September 17)

Today we talked to Koen ‘t Hof, professor of applied psychology at the HvA. He is specialised in safety perception and wrote a lot of articles on it which we can use for our research. Just to remember: Veiligheidsbeleving en de Tafel van Twaalf and Circling Safety – feeling (un)safe at Railway stations are the most useful for our project.

We started with a talk about his articles in which he found out that going out areas and railwaystations are the most dangerous. We discussed what makes certain places more dangerous, which would be garbage etc. Also, we found out that it is difficult to evaluate the impact of the safety enhancers. This is due to the fact that there are a lot of variables during evaluating. The environment is constantly changing, so it is difficult to do controlled experiments. We will have to think about this, when recording our results.

The next thing we discussed was about the influences of the perception of safety. Koen found out in his railwaystation research, that, people around that are perceived as being dangerous, influence the perception of safety. This means that the fear of people increases, when people perceived as dangerous, are around. On the other hand, it can also increase the feeling of safety, when there are comforting people around. There is an interesting model on it, which we will elaborate on later, since we did not find it yet.

After that, we discussed some possible solutions for the unsafety problem. Koen was talking about scent, which is interesting, but difficult to adapt in public space. This would make people less aggressive. A more interesting idea is the tunnel that makes bird sounds. It is focused on the cognitive experience. So someone will bike through a tunnel, her phone is connected with the tunnel which will tell the tunnel that for example Sophie is arriving. The tunnel will display ‘Hello Sophie’ and she will be asked what bird she hears most often in the tunnel. This causes her to be cognitively busy, so she doesn’t think about feeling unsafe anymore. We could talk to the guy that has thought of this cognitive process of the tunnel. It might be interesting for our own product.

final The other important thing was the fear of crime paradox which Van ‘t Hof talks about in his research on the railway stations. Where people feel safe, they are mostly unsafe. He gave the example of the center of Amsterdam where people feel safe, but actually they are the least safe. He also mentioned the bystander effect which entails that when there are more people around, people tend to offer less help to victims. This is interesting, since in busy places, people actually feel more safe, but when something happens, they will not get a lot of help.

Then back to Amsterdam. We are having a tiny problem with finding negative results on the safety of women. Amsterdam is too safe. So we asked Koen if he knew more about the safety of Amsterdam. The interesting thing he said is that there are a lot of difference in the perception of safety and the actual safety of an area. This means that a safe area can have the perception of being unsafe. This is what we should focus on. But it is verrrry important that we don’t make people feel safe in an unsafe area. (If we do want

to do this we should first make sure that the people are safe in the certain area) We can see that often people are very positive about their own neighbourhood. (That is what Koen said) This is because they think it is more predictable. So we should not only ask people from theirneighbourhood if they feel safe, because the ‘ visitors’ are more important for our research.Loes mentioned after the meeting that one of the teammates in India said the complete opposite. They want to make women feel safe in unsafe areas, so they will stand up for their rights. This shows the big difference between Holland and India.

We also talked about the perception of risk. If there are bigger consequence to a possible crime, then there is a bigger risk perception. Someone who is specialized in this, is Paul Slovic. We might want to use this in our research.

People we can talk to: Koen talked about the municipality that is trying to make certain areas more safe, but it won’t improve. An important area is Nieuw-West where they can not succeed to make it safer. Koen will ask his colleague to find out if we contact a certain person from the municipality. It is also an idea to talk to the CCV which stands for Centrum
criminaliteitspreventie veiligheid. This means Centre for Criminalprevention safety. And as I already mentioned, we can talk to the guy from the interactive tunnel. We should also talk to someone from slachtofferhulp.

CREATING TOMORROW

Women Safety (NL)

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Workshop on Design Research by Marco van Hout (September 18)

Meeting with Koen ‘t Hof (September 17)