| dc.description | First Aid for Fairness is a subscription offered to every hospital in Norway consisting of posters with visualized stories and a coherent website with additional digital interaction. The service aims to address biases and prejudice by visualizing real stories from real people in Norwegian hospitals, and spark debate on the topics and themes the people in the stories might experience.
An extensive data collection with individual interviews of nine doctors identifying as women indicated that systemic subconscious biases still occur in our hospitals. I want to tell these stories to create debate and call to action when we meet biases in our workplaces that hinder equality. This, together with extensive historical research on the topic, made me create the following problem statement: How might interaction and service design proposals shed light on and spark conversations about the overt and the subconscious biases that hospital staff may encounter?
By taking the stories from the hallways, and putting them up on the walls, the user is invited to read and reflect on the stories. The service aims to present a familiar message, but to present it in a non-dangerous way with comic strips of bright colors, to soften the potential blow. Do the user metaphorically see themselves somewhere in the story? If so, they may reflect in private, or seek discussion with others. We hope the service can generate stories from roles other than who we have interviewed so far. Anyone working at a hospital who can view the poster is considered a user. We do not decide who relates to the stories.
The service offering is circular in terms of content: The posters, containing visualized stories, aims to spark reflection and debate about biases with the users, and potentially have a user send in a new story via the QR code, which takes you to the website. The first round of data collection comes from early 2024, and the stories affecting the interviewed women negatively are experienced recently. Therefore we propose that the right time to do this is right here and now.
First Aid for Fairness aims to define objectives to investigate intersectional biases in Norwegian hospitals, focusing initially on gendered bias due to time limitations. This involves identifying subtle, often subconscious biases in professional environments and using methodologies to challenge and transform them. I wish to inspire others to maintain the debate on role-based expectations, and to challenge biases when we encounter them, for the sake of equity. | en_US |
