Designing with Immigrants. When emotions run high.

2019

Students desire meaningful ways to dissect and explore confusing and challenging concepts. Chief among these in our world today are the multifaceted issues and exceptionally complex discourses involved in immigration. The guided visualization in this G.I.F.T. may be used to demonstrate emotions, the five cannons of rhetoric, intercultural communication, proofs of persuasion, or theories within the critical or phenomenological traditions. This guided visualization also adapts well to a blended classroom (with students onsite and offsite) since the instructor leads students through the visualization. Through this activity, students will describe the emotions that underpin communication about immigration, interpret how emotions influence meaning, examine personal biases that influence understanding, and formulate a new understanding of the impact of biases regarding cultural communication.

International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR'23), 2023

In recent decades, the field of design, particularly interaction design, has brought attention to the experiences of migrants with technology. A key aspect of this research has been the active involvement of displaced communities in the design process, through the implementation of empathic design approaches. These approaches place significant value on subjective and experiential perspectives fostering a thought process in which individuals seek to understand others by relating to their experiences. Following this empathic approach, this work focuses on the design for and with migrants, by engaging long-term migrants through a focus group and a participatory activity. The aim of this work was to reflect on participants' migration experiences through the creation of design artifacts. The created artifacts were analysed and discussed through the lens of empathic design approaches to distil implications to inform design in support of arriving migrants. Our findings highlight the importance of empathic design in the interaction design field and to promote social inclusion for marginalized communities.

Immigration gives rise to global and local changes that challenge social norms and affect our lives. By involving immigrants in design processes, we emphasize designers’ responsibility for social inclusion. In this context, our main question is how to engage with immigrants in participatory design research. To answer this question, we present a review of a recent research approach we applied in Helsinki (Finland) while collaborating with immigrants in a design project. Arising from this study, it is our recommendation that design researchers working with immigrants must take into account the question of emotional involvement. In this article, together with a mental health specialist, we analyze our findings in order to provide insights into how designers could create better interactions with vulnerable populations while conducting fieldwork. Among others, we recommend that dealing with emotions requires debriefing and defusing processes.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Immigrants represent a substantial part of European society. After emigration, they can suffer from fundamental changes in their socioeconomic environment. Therefore, supportive ICT services (e.g. for language learning or job search) have high potential to ease inclusion, especially for newly arrived immigrants with low education. Within an international research project we involve Turkish and Arabic immigrants in a user-centered design (UCD) process with the goal to develop supportive ICT services for smartphones. In this paper, we present our methodological experiences and discuss benefits and drawbacks of methods. Based thereupon, we formulate concrete implications for successful UCD with immigrants, e.g. collaborating with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or benefiting from reflections of long term-immigrants.

2011

The emotional experiences of people who live together tend to be similar; this is true not only for dyads and groups but also for cultures. It raises the question of whether immigrants' emotions become more similar to host culture patterns of emotional experience; do emotions acculturate? Two studies, on Korean immigrants in the United States (Study 1) and on Turkish immigrants in Belgium (Study 2), measured emotional experiences of immigrants and host group members with the Emotional Patterns Questionnaire. To obtain a measure of the immigrants' emotional similarity to the host group, their individual emotional patterns were correlated to the average pattern of the host group. Immigrants' exposure to and engagement in the host culture, but not their acculturation attitudes, predicted emotional acculturation.

IASDR 2019, 2019

Design for social integration aims to provide support to foster societies that are inclusive and tolerant with a diverse array of people, regardless of whether they are locals or migrants. So far, in order to support migrants on their integration to a new society, a diverse range of tools have been developed which have been more focused on providing technical knowledge about migration (e.g., learning a language, legal orientation). However, developing positive interactions between locals and migrants is also a potential strategy for facilitating migrants' integration into a new society, as it helps to overcome prejudices and social exclusion which has been in rise recently. Since this strategy is underexplored, we conducted a study with the local and international community at a university in Istanbul to understand interactions between these communities and identify ways of encouraging positive interactions between culturally different groups. In this paper, we present four themes, three design tactics along with three design speculations derived from this study.

2010

Immigration and multiculturalism are realities of the globalized world that has given rise to subcultures, which possess specialized knowledge and language that is not shared by the main culture. This increasing interaction among people from diverse cultures has produced a complex ethno-cultural mosaic that presents formidable challenges for visual communication designers’ as well to other designers. Complexity has always been part of human environments that comprises of mutually dependent social relations. Cultural diversity of designers and audience of messages in a design scenario brings complexity in the design research process. This research study explores an effective visual communication language, through the medium of the poster, for culturally diverse audience of immigrant women in Edmonton, Canada. The decision, to investigate the effectiveness of a visual message through the medium of the poster was informed by triangulated results from a pre-workshop survey, interviews w...

Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group, 2021

Migration and diaspora are phenomenons that are continuously shaping the world, and that are caused and informed by colonial structures. The communities in diaspora are held together by particular ways of imagining and relating with the homeland, the host culture, and themselves, touching back into the local. In the experience of migrating and becoming part of a diaspora, our identities shift, as we enter a state of tension between total assimilation and resistance, questioning our national hegemonic values and ways of being. As a designer with migrated roots, I would like to share some experiences and thoughts about working in codesign processes with migrant communities: How do we matter our worlds from a diasporic situatedness, and what does this mean in terms of encouraging decolonial processes in design? Which strategies might help us challenging our assumptions as designers? Ultimately, I want to continue conversations about the role of design into materialising dissent and contestation towards the hegemonic systems, centering migrant and diasporic ways of being. How might these reflections inspire us for future practices in design?

The international journal of design in society, 2022

What kind of art and design practice can be developed to boost the social and cultural inclusion of newly arrived immigrants and refugees to their new places of residence? Is there something the host society can do to involve artists, designers, stakeholders, and citizens to support these vulnerable new fellow citizens, to help them feel more confident with their new lives and promote their emancipation? With this and other questions in mind, we decided to develop a hybrid art and design participatory project with immigrant and refugee communities, which took place in the summer of 2019, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (US). The political situation of the US, which was at the moment somehow hostile to new immigrants, was the perfect context for our project to make a strong statement. The article starts by contextualizing the project in sociological terms, as well as arguing about this hybrid practice field of participatory art and design, specifically through some paradigmatic case studies. We also focus on other topics that are central to our practice, such as the domain of participation and creative thinking, as well as the importance of strategically considering each part of the project as a specific mechanism. In a more conceptual approach, we also focus on the migrants' overwhelming situation, inspired by Paulo Freire´s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," where he advocates the development of a "praxis" to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressors and promote a righteous society. Following is a description of the methodology used for the interaction with the participants, namely the creation of a specific game, which is a form of self-representation and enhancement of the engaged immigrant and refugee communities. The core of the article is concerned with the project's playful nature, which is explained according to the concept of game by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The article ends with some extra data collected through interviews, as well as a reflection concerning the experimented practice.