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Project 2: Designing for Human Rights Clinic COURAGE
For this project, Professor Tran divided the class into teams of 3-4 students to conduct design thinking and goal directed design to propose design solutions to further COURAGE’s work to “identify good practices and increase accountability” regarding domestic violence and sexual assault, both in the U.S. and globally. 2 teams will be assigned to look at the issue at the local/domestic level and 3 teams will be focused at looking at the issue from a global perspective to understand how the needs are both similar but also different. In my case, I was assigned to the team focused on Latin America.
For this course assignment, we will employ human centered design (HCD) techniques both in-class and outside of class to identify target stakeholders and users and their needs. This includes but is not limited to stakeholder mapping, interviewing, and competitive analysis of things they are currently using.
Name: Latin America team
- Maria Aguilar
- Mackenzie Miller
- Amanda Barry
- COURAGE team member: Fernando Bertoncello
Assuming the role of designers, we will work in small teams alongside a law student who will be our subject matter expert and key COURAGE (Community Oriented and United Responses to Address Gender Violence and Equality) stakeholder to become familiar with the complex subject matter of domestic violence and sexual assault. Through this collaboration and design process, the purpose of the project is to propose the design of information systems and other interactive solutions that may assist in identifying and preventing gender bias in law enforcement responses to domestic violence and sexual assault.
For law enforcement, advocates, victims/survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, or any other group of people who are looking for help, guidance, information or statistics about this topic, our public portal web will provide them with a simple and powerful tool to approach their needs. Different from the current COURAGE web page, our portal web combines the aesthetics with a clean and organized way to show the information to be easily founded by any person who is looking for assistance in identifying, preventing or who is going through a problem of domestic violence and sexual assault. Furthermore, the intention of this solution is to reach countries and regions from US and Latin America, thus it will provide the option to see the information in different languages as well as printable resources to give information to communities that don’t have easy access to technology.
The main goals for this project are:
- Offer an alternative to the current information from the COURAGE web page and organize and adapt it to be easily understandable by any person.
- Assist law enforcement, advocates and victims/survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault by having three specific sections to find information concerned to what they need, it will help them to save time and feel comfortable with any situation they may be facing.
- Offer an accessible solution for people in different regions and countries in US and Latin America.
- Include a victim centered approach by offering resources as hotlines, police stations, physicians or advocates information according to the location of the victim.
In class, before meeting our COURAGE team member, we did some brainstorming about our stakeholders and we got our Stakeholder Mapping diagram, as shown below:
My first impression about this topic came for Home Truth, a documentary film detailing a domestic violence survivor’s groundbreaking quest for justice that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and an international human rights tribunal. I attended the film screening at University of Miami and also joined a panel discussion featuring the filmmakers, human rights experts, and the survivor-activist herself – Jessica Lenahan.
Home Truth available here tells the story of Jessica Gonzales, who had experienced every parent’s worst nightmare when her three young daughters were killed after being abducted by their father in violation of a restraining order. Devastated, Jessica filed a lawsuit against the police, claiming they did not adequately enforce her restraining order despite her repeated calls for help that night. Determined to make sure her daughters did not die in vain, Jessica has pursued her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and an international human rights tribunal, seeking to strengthen legal rights for domestic violence victims.
We stated some questions for our stakeholders that we asked according to their role.
- Have you or someone you know been sexually assaulted or experienced domestic abuse?
- Do you know anything about laws and programs that (country here) has put into place to help raise awareness/prevent forms of physical abuse?
- Do you think physical/sexual abuse is a bigger problem in the US or (country here)? Is it being addressed in both places equally?
- Are women in (country here) willing to come forward and report abuse?
- Do you think women trust police departments?
- How can rural communities have better access to prevention and intervention resources?
- How does Latin culture come into play with all of this?
- What are the differences between public policy efforts in Latin America vs. US?
- How can the community become involved with creating a violence prevention and intervention network?
As a group, we interviewed Rosie Hidalgo and Fernando Bertoncello. Mackenzie also interviewed a 26-yr-old woman from Colombia living in Miami, who knows some people that have been sexually assaulted or experienced domestic abuse.
- Senior Director of Public Policy for Casa de Esperanza: National Latin@ Network for Healthy Families and Communities Rosie previously served as the Deputy Director for Policy at the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) at the U.S. Department of Justice. Prior to working at OVW, Rosie had worked as the National Policy Director at Casa/NLN and served on the Steering Committee of the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence where she played an active role in national advocacy efforts to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 2013. Rosie previously worked at the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence and as an attorney at legal services programs for low-income families in New York City and in Northern Virginia. Rosie, the daughter of immigrants from Cuba, has spent a total of ten years as an adult living in three different countries in Latin America, including living in the Dominican Republic from 2002-2006, where she helped establish and coordinate a community-based domestic violence prevention and intervention network and worked as a consultant for the World Bank on social services reforms.
Fortunately, we had the chance to talk with Rosie. Several key takeaways from our talk with Rosie: When taking cases about domestic violence, it’s important to respect victims if they don’t want to call and report the case, a common phrase is “the police make it worst”. Furthermore, in domestic violence cases, sometimes jail is not the solution because it could result in economic instability or revenge with contacts in high positions. She also talked a lot about data: The number of calls to report domestic violence was high, and law enforcement officials did not put enough resources to answer them. However, then the number of calls decreased, but the number of opened cases without solution increased. She thinks that a possible solution is a system to sort and display data to easily analyze and find the best approach to address the problems. She also said that we could use data to monitor what law enforcement is doing, or even a simple mobile app that could help people to report violence. Videos could also achieve this, for example “tea consent” See video here is a video that teach about consent making the analogy with a cup of tea.
- Brazilian lawyer and current student at UM’s School of Law’s COURAGE
A big case that we learned from Fernando was Maria Da Penha, a case that reached the Inter American Commission of Human Rights (similar to Jessica Lenahan case). The case da Penha filed languished in court for two decades, while Maria's husband remained free. Years later, in a landmark ruling, the Court of Human Rights criticized the Brazilian government for not taking effective measures to prosecute and convict perpetrators of domestic violence. In response to this, the Brazilian government in 2006 enacted a law under the symbolic name “Maria da Penha Law on Domestic and Family Violence. Something else that Fernando emphasized that even though laws change, culture doesn’t change; Brazil has some very forward-thinking laws but they aren’t generally accepted in society.
To address this situation, women’s groups in the region have begun to promote special women’s police units to be run and staffed by women. Brazil was the first country to establish these special units in 1985 with five countries following suit. These centers are a example of victim centered solutions which should be replicated in many other countries.
Fernando also told us about the necessity of women to be represented by women; however he also mentioned intersectionality, which is a widespread problem that it's worth paying attention.
Intersectionality, "The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise." (Oxford Dictionary)
For confidentiality issues, I will not mention her name. She was born and raised in Colombia and moved to the US to marry her husband. She now lives in Miami and is waiting for her green card paperwork to be processed. She brought to light how Colombia has a very masculine culture, which directly causes how children are raised and how men treat women. She believes that the US has been implementing successful programs that bring awareness to abuse. In Colombia, these programs do not exist, and as a result of this and the culture, men do not see abuse as wrong. She believes that educating the children is the key to changing this repeating cycle.
We had a joint class with the UM law students to perform some design thinking activities. Below are some pictures taken from UM Interactive Instagram! 📷
Some of the methods we used where:
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IDEO’s Share Inspiring Stories: The objective of this technique is sharing inspiring stories with the teammates so that they become part of a collective consciousness. Fernando told us some stories and I also knew some stories about victims from Peru. We wrote short sentences about them in Post-its to start imagining opportunities and solutions.
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IDEO’s Finding Theme:It consists on gathering the team around the Post-its and moving the most compelling, common, and inspiring quotes, stories, or ideas to a new board and sort them into categories. The objective of this technique is identifying themes to help us to create frameworks and design principles.
The image below shows the stories we wrote on post-its and then we identified 3 main themes: Politics & Policy, Victim Center Approach and Culture.
- IDEO’s Insight Statements: After sharing inspiring stories and finding themes, we decided to use the IDEO's Insight Statements technique in order to transform the themes into core insights of our research. According to IDEO, creating succinct sentences are incredibly valuable as they helped us to frame "How Might We" questions and give shape and form to subsequent Brainstorms.
Amanda, Mackenzie and I met and we identified the following insight statements:
- In what ways might we increase female representation in politics and in higher levels of power while avoiding intersectionality?
- In what ways can we implement women-based police stations in Latin America so that women feel safe to come forward and seek help and treatment?
- In what ways will a victim-centered approach have the most potential for changing the culture? In what ways will media have potential to connect policy and culture?
- How might we address the need to increase education about violence and abuse in less developed areas?
Furthermore, as this is an impactful project, we joined forces in class and shared ideas to identify possible solutions. We applied again the Insight Statements method and identified four main themes (Shown in the image below). Then, each group had the opportunity to chose one of these themes.
According to those themes, after a careful review, my team and I decided to focus on: How might we build on (share) existing materials/best practices? thinking as the possible solution designing a public platform.
Below is a brief summary of our design precedents. From social campaigns to virtual reality designs, there are solutions aimed at assisting victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. However there is no one place where you can find compiled information about them. Three of the web pages listed will prove to be useful for creating a solution: the COURAGE web page, University of Miami It’s On Us web page, and the World Health Organization home page. The COURAGE page contains a lot of really good information; however, it is not well organized which makes it hard to understand and read. Furthermore we liked the It’s On Us web page because it has a clear organization and many options for students who are seeking help. Finally, the web page for World Health Organization contains a language translation tool as well as an option to filter information by regions, which makes it more helpful and approachable. We believe that a combination of these 3 pages would be a great solution to achieve our purpose.
In class, we applied the technique Empathy Mapping to gain a deeper insight into our users. As a team, we developed the empathy map of Paul, the Policymaker:
We also thought that the following empathy maps, for a police and a victim, made by other teams in the class would be useful for our solution:
Based on our selected empathy maps, we developed 3 Personas that would represent our targeted audience:
- Mateo, the Police Officer: Developed by Mackenzie
- Annie, the Advocate: Developed by Amanda
- Teresa, a Colombian woman that was a victim of domestic violence 10 years ago and now she wants to share her story to help other women like her: Developed by me.
Amanda, Mackenzie and I met and we decided to apply the technique Rose, Thorn, Bud to analyze existing web pages aimed at giving information for domestic violence victims and how could they be developed for Latin America.
For this method we should keep in mind the following key:
- a. Rose: Red post-its, representing positive ideas.
- b. Bud: Yellow post-its, representing opportunities and potential ideas.
- c. Thorn: Blue post-its, representing negative ideas.
The proposed solution is a public online platform that will contain resources for law enforcement, advocates, and victims to obtain information on course of action when dealing with sexual misconduct. We used the Concept Poster template from LUMA to sketch our idea as shown below:
We have developed Scenarios about the ideal user experiences to explain how our product fits into each of our persona's life and environment, and how it helps them achieve their goals.
We have developed 3 scenarios for each of the personas stated.
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Mackenzie developed a scenario for Mateo, a Colombian Police Officer. In this scenario Mateo doesn't have much experience with domestic abuse cases, and when a case about a women being beaten by her husband is assigned to him, he starts looking for resources online. He finds the COURAGE web page where he can learn about Officer responses protocol for victims of domestic violence as well as helpful resources for victims.
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Amanda developed a scenario for Amy, the Advocate. In this scenario, Amy is moving from a favela in Brazil to a wealthier are of Brazil, then she get to know about the Women's Police stations and she wonders how she can get involved in the awareness of domestic violence. She finds the COURAGE web page where she finds helpful information that can be printed and distributed to areas that lack of technology.
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I have developed a scenario for Teresa, the victim. In this scenario Teresa feels helpless and full of doubts about her situation so she decides to look for help in the Internet. Fortunately she finds the COURAGE web page where she starts navigating, she can change the web page language to Spanish and she realizes then that the information given in this portal is useful for her situation. Finally, she finds an option to ask for help where she gets the contact information of different resources (as police stations, advocates, psychologists, etc.) that are near to her location.
Below is the scenario that I made for Teresa.
| Requirement Definition | |
|---|---|
| 1 | The solution shall address, in a sustained manner, a way to arrange existing information and organize it to help identifying and preventing gender bias in law enforcement responses to domestic violence and sexual assault. |
| 2 | The solution shall use the current information form COURAGE web page. |
| 3 | The solution shall be inclusive to address domestic violence and sexual assault in the U.S. and Latin America. |
| 4 | The solution shall show the information organized in three categories related to: Law enforcement, Advocates, and Victims and survivors. |
| 5 | Aside the three categories mentioned in Requirement 4, the solution shall contain information to be easily founded by any person who doesn’t consider himself or herself belong to any of those three categories. |
| 6 | The solution shall have the option to change the language. Initially it will have the option to change from English to Spanish; in the future it could include other languages as Portuguese. |
| 7 | The solution shall have an administrator that keeps information updated and translated to all the offered languages. |
| 8 | The solution shall offer printable resources with relevant information in order to reach communities that lack of technology. |
| 9 | The solution shall show, in all sections, a hotline or an optional resource to report domestic violence or sexual assault. |
| 10 | The solution shall maintain a clean and simple aesthetics. |
| 11 | The solution shall address the problem of domestic violence and sexual assault carefully and use appropriate language. |
| 12 | The solution shall be accessible from any web browser as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. |
| 13 | The solution shall include the information of COURAGE project and current work. |
| 14 | The solution shall include relevant upcoming events that may help to assist in the problem of domestic violence and sexual assault. |
| 15 | The solution shall include the DOJ guidance for law enforcement. |
The key factors driving our design solution included accessibility and clear information. After completing an audit of design precedents, we felt that a stakeholder visiting the site should be able to quickly access the information they need depending on who they are. For example, a victim, law enforcement or advocate may be looking for information on how to deal with a domestic violence situation and they would all need different resources to get the right information. We found that there was an overwhelming amount of information without a clear way of arriving to the information that you may need. For the user to find what they need efficiently, we decided to make an easy portal to enter the information once they identify who they are (victim/survivor, law enforcement or advocate). In addition, all the information must be available in multiple languages spoken around the world, as well as be up to date/relevant according to your location. To solve this issue, we decided to add a GPS option in order for a victim to know their rights in their area as well as where they can go for help. In addition, if a person quickly wants information without identifying themselves through the portal, we added quick links to important information on the header for all pages. Users should be able to download information as PDF printable in order to easily have this information handy and share it within their community. This website will help victims around the world to get help, law enforcement to follow correct procedures, and advocates to spread awareness on domestic violence.
We chose the scenario for Mateo, the police officer as the main scenario to state our idea. Mackenzie developed this scenario before; however, for this one, we added some details taking into account the last version we made for the web page prototype. The image below shows this scenario:
The following image shows the sitemap of our proposed solution:
First of all, we wrote down all the information that we needed to include in the web page, then we developed some basic mockups in Illustrator, and finally we decided to use Wix.com to make the interactive prototype. I was responsible of finding the information, organize it in the different sections that we defined for the web page, and looking for documents to make an enhanced version for our printables. Amanda developed some icons in Illustrator as well as the PDFs to make our printables. Mackenzie personalized the template from Wix that we decided to use and also helped with the PDFs.
The following images show our process:
The link to our interactive prototype is here.
The following images show screenshots of our final website. The first image shows how each section of advocates, law enforcement and victims look like, and the second image shows example of printable PDFs.
