Experiment 1 : Woking withStigma
In this video, people suffering from mental health issues anonymously talk to others about their opinions on mental health. And at the end they reveal that they have severe or are in long term recovery from mental health.
This inspired me to get a sex worker to ask a member of the public questions about sex work and sex workers. About the stigma behind it and their opinions, then for the sex worker to share a bit about their reality.
The public member did not know they were chatting with a sex worker to begin with, this was revealed at the end of the questions.
I thought that this would help in pushing the topic out in the open with honest feelings.
I also built a heart rate monitor belt, which was worn by participants. If their heart rate exceeded by a certain amount then lights would start flashing and haptic vibrations would be offset.
The sex worker asking the questions was anonymous, and at the end she reveals that she is a retired sex worker.
Experiment 2: Physical Play / Vote / Learn
It was becoming more and more apparent in my project, that in order to get any support for sex workers I needed people to vote.
I also understood that for people to vote for something that was so far from their reality, they needed to be engaged in a fun and playful manner where they could also learn!
I thought that if we had a physical to digital voting system, where you would tap an RFID to vote and a colour would pop up representing your vote, as well as 3 other colours representing others who had voted. The stronger the intensity of the colour the more votes.
This actually proved to be quite compelling for testers.
And thus influenced my design choice of building a colour centric multiplayer voting system for my main design.
Unfortunately, for accessibility reasons I decide to go wholly digital, but the multi player and colour aspect remained.
End design iterations for live voting data digitally
The very first thing I was told before I even started my project was that this is a stigmatised topic, totally taboo and I had better switch my focus to something else.
So to actually conduct research and ask people what they thought about the topic would be a nightmare, I though. I subsequently got really inspire by a social experiment conducted in Singapore on the taboo topic of hiring people who suffered from mental health.