Women's Safety — Lily Samimi

OVERVIEW

Turn is a wearable technology which uses GPS to track and notify people closest to the woman being attacked.

MY ROLE

In February 2015 my colleague and I competed in the Interaction Design Award's (IxDA) annual Student Design Challenge. The challenge asked students to answer the question, "What is the future of wearable city". Turn was among the 5 projects that were selected from 150 international entries to come to San Francisco to develop the concept and present our work at the IxDA Conference.

My colleague and I, both passionate about women's rights and women's safety, created Turn.

THE DESIGN PROBLEM

What is the future of the wearable city? How might we design the future of wearable city taking into consideration women's safety?

THE PROCESS

Day 1

The first day was quite the whirlwind, meeting all the other students, getting set up in Cooper and mentally preparing for the craziness about to ensue. We also got introduced to our co-chairs and mentors for the days. After a quick rundown of what is and is not a wearable, we were off, each student being assigned a neighborhood in SF to research. We got the Mission District, an area of the city that is known to have a high assault and rape count. Walking down 24th street in the Mission in the afternoon, we tried to put ourselves in the position of women residents to help us find out what about the Mission District made it so unsafe. We stopped several female residents on the streets and chatted with them to get an understanding of how they perceive their neighborhood and what safety meant to them. This wasn't an easy topic to talk about with strangers but we managed to get a few people comfortable enough to open up.

Chatting with female residents of the Mission District

The Mission District

Day 2/3

Days two and three were all a bit of a blur, more ideating, testing and building concepts alongside the guidance of the mentors. We had the chance to interview with some contacts the mentors had lined up. We spoke with a representative from the Mission Police Department and at the Women's Building in the Mission District. We learned more about what kind of crime occurs the most in the neighborhood, what kind of help/assistance women have been seeking in the area and preventative measures that could be taken to stop a crime from happening in the first place. We were also given the opportunity to test out a series of our prototypes and get feedback from conference goers.

Spoke with SF Women Against Rape

Artifact of how most assault and rape cases are reported

Persona of our user

First iteration: Wearable pin

Storyboarding our first iteration

Testing our pin prototype

Testing the mobile app

Second iteration: Wearable ring

Prototyping the ring

Testing the wearable ring prototype

Kruthi (my colleague) and I

Here's us presenting Turn at the IxDA conference

OUTCOMES

We got third place at the Student Design Challenge! Here is our presentation at the conference:

CHALLENGES

GPS tracking can pose a threat to women as it can attract potential attackers to use the application to find those women.
The topic of safety, specifically women's safety, can be very sensitive. The research and design phase needs to be very cognizant of that.
Our research indicated that women don't want it to be known that they are wearing a product that is designed to project them.