Hacking the Racial Binary

Until today, I used the words, “fidelity” and “resolution” synonymously when describing varying levels of completion for prototypes, but I learned that they may refer to two different areas of prototypes. This difference can be a powerful tool in analyzing the success of a project and get a better understanding of what is missing. First, fidelity refers to the idea side of a product. It addresses questions like “how many details have you figured out at this point?” and high fidelity prototypes can measure effectiveness and usability of a solution. In addition, as fidelity has to do with the conceptual development of a prototype, prototypes of all levels of fidelity are powerful tools for research. Specifically, they are great for understanding potential solutions, prioritizing features and functions, and assessing viability and strategic positioning.

Resolution, on the other hand, applies to the real-ness of a prototype, and addresses the question of “how real does it appear to end users?” High resolution prototypes like demos and and wireframes are great for presenting to potential users and testing solutions. Low resolution prototypes like journey maps and flow diagrams are great for defining solutions. 

The Needs, Context, Channels, and Factors is an exercise that helps you close in on your user persona and communicate the intent for your project more clearly. The above image documents the exercise I did for a service platform that I’m working on. I defined my persona as “Overachieving Asians” who have not only assimilated into mainstream American society but also have become part of the upper class, working in a profession like a corporate lawyer, and wearing a navy suit everyday. In this exercise, the needs refer to pain points I’m trying to solve; context is the surroundings and circumstances where this pain point may occur; the channels are how I would reach my users, and factors are traits that characterize their lifestyles.

https://nicolefenton.com/

Attended a super informative lecture by Nicole Fenton today! I will be hiring an editor for the first time for my thesis book, and the lecture taught me what constitutes a good writer/editor relationship. A few of the key points that form the foundation of a constructive editing collaboration are: 

openness to discuss when they are stuck

openness to feedback

considering that they may be wrong

TERMS I CAN DEFINE TODAY

Model Minority – Asians and other minority groups who have achieved assimilation into mainstream American society. They have middleclass to higher socioeconomic status, and the reasons for their successes are attributed to hard work. The idea of hardworking Asians achieving success has wrongly been used to condemn black Americans, ignoring the institutionalized racism and discrimination that black Americans have faced, and foolishly claiming that their plight is because of laziness. Model Minorities are whitewashed.

Related: American Dream, Success

Assimilation – Often, this is the trait that distinguishes whether immigrants deserve to stay in America, and it is synonymous as being white. It’s most prominent in the ways in which the media portrays DACA recipients. The dreamers who are interviewed are always ones who speak English fluently, have attained higher education, and therefore arouse sympathy in the viewers and show that they are the “good immigrants” who can contribute to the society, rather than exploiting the resources.

Synonyms: Integration, Whitewash

Third Culture Kids – refers to children who grow up with exposures to more than one culture. Its most recognized stereotype is children of expats who attend international schools. For this thesis, third culture kids refer mostly to immigrants who migrate to the US in formative years of their identities (6-18), and second to third generation children of immigrants.

Racial Impostor Syndrome – the feeling that you do not have the right to claim the cultures and races associated with your identity. It is most pronounced for interracial people who cannot visually fit in one race or another, but the experience is also shared by third culture kids who learn to wear many cultural hats depending on contexts.

Related: Shame

TERMS THAT I’M STRUGGLING TO DEFINE

White – it’s easy to define it as the Anglo-Saxon heritage or the imagery associated with success in America, but it’s more than that. Its attributes include manners of speaking, education, food, dress, etc.  

This is an image of the exercise I did during class called performance continuum that shows how my work measures up to my intention. Each of these continuums shows two ideas closely related to my work, and the circles display where my work was for midterm thesis defense last December, where it is now, and where I intend to take it. 

Codeswitching is the practice of shifting the ways you speak depending on context, and it’s very prevalent among my user group. I envisioned an app, Switch, that tracks your code switch by syncing the user’s speech patterns and by listening to your speech.

It was a week before I turned 13 that I moved to the suburbs of Boston from Tokyo. I didn’t speak a word of English, yet I did not need the language skill to understand how alien I must have seemed to my peers in the dominantly white, upper middleclass junior high school: everything from the way I dressed to what I brought for lunch and how I smelled signaled that I was not one of them. Like many 1.5 generation immigrants, however, in a matter of few years I assimilated to New England, eliminating my Japanese accent, pretending that my family ate meatloaves and mash at home too, and ditching graphic novels for Harry Potter. All this came at a cost, of course. A cost that I had neglected until now.

My thesis, “Hacking the Racial Binary: design provocations for empathy and shame,” is an exploration on identity struggles for model minorities. Model Minority refers to an idea that was popularized in post-WWII America to refer to how selective ethnic minorities such as Asian Americans could prove themselves through hard work and assimilate into mainstream culture. This idea is most often criticized for its false parallel to the racism that black Americans have faced. The rhetoric goes, if Asians can climb up the socio-economic ladder through hard work, the reasons that the black Americans have failed to do so must be their pathology and deficiency, and not the systematic dehumanization that they have withstood.

While my thesis journey started out by exploring identity and immigration more broadly, two key insights from user interviews forced me to pivot my direction and focus on race. Speaking with more than twenty immigrants and children of immigrants, it first became clear that the central tension in their identities was between the community they assimilated to and the community they came from. Many described their shame in both not being American enough and losing touch with their cultural heritage. Secondly, this tension was deeply colored in their relationship with race because the communities they aspired to assimilate were white, while their heritages signaled how exotic, primitive, and childlike they were.

Week 3: Speculative Object

Week 2: Models for 100 sketches