The kickoff
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.
- Staring
- Commenting
- Following
——– - Physical molestation
- 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.