Humans of Utrecht
This interactive installation for the City of Utrecht Archive is a humbling lesson in unlearning stereotypes.
The stories we hear and see every day have a huge impact on us. Images from commercials and films and words in newspapers program us unconsciously.
Team
Creative concept and design: Marjolein Pijnappels
Interaction design: Dick Poelen
Data: Utrechts Archief
Designing for diversity
You cannot talk about designing for diversity and not address stereotypes. Stereotypes in storytelling are problematic, not so much because they are completely untrue, but because they are incomplete and restrict and harm actual living, breathing humans.
The images we see every day have a huge impact on us, often unconsciously. Commercials, films and illustrations program us to automatically create links in our minds.
When we say ‘family’ you might involuntarily think of a dad, mom and children. When you picture a scientist, you might imagine a white man in a lab coat. And visualise a vegan person, a car driver, a farmer, what do you see? These automatic images are based on subconsciously programmed biases. You can’t always overwrite this, even if you want to. These automatic programs are often very useful and not at all bad, we don’t have the brainpower to do everything consciously, think about riding a bike or getting ready in the morning. It does get problematic when we never question or challenge these programs, especially stereotypes, or worse, think they are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Even if you are aware of your own prejudices, it is difficult to overwrite these automatic programmings. I have been aware of the biases in gender in (graphic) design for years. For my design agency Studio Lakmoes I carried out a quick-scan of a 100 infographics that confirmed that the (white) man is the standard in infographics. Working in design, I tried to consciously challenge gender biases in my designs.
But inclusive design goes further than showing different genders in an infographic, and my ‘diverse’ designs weren’t inclusive at all. It became clear that me and my team often illustrate cis, young, white, average-figured, abled-bodied people. Apparently you design who you are, but designs are aimed at a target audience that consists of a varied human bouquet of old and young, different ethnicities, physical builds, culture and sexuality.
this is a static image of the infographic
Designing Humans of Utrecht
In this Studio Lakmoes project we developed an interactive infographic, displayed on an LCD-screen of 2 by 1 meter for the Utrecht Archives that shows the diversity of the humans of Utrecht. We explicitly tried not to illustrate the average person, but rather to portray the great diversity of different humans. You see a black father with his two kids, a hipster in a wheelchair, an ambitious pregnant employee, a gay couple with two kids, a flexitarian of advanced age and a muslim couple in love.
“Instead of trying to imagine the average person, and then plug in the various attributes—which, uh, inevitably somehow start to look like us—we set out to illustrate every person.”
- Shopify
For the seven different themes of the Archive’s permanent exhibition, we designed color-coded informational stories using graphs and illustrations to tell the story. We created a total of 59 different humans each representing the different humans living in the City of Utrecht.
The shapes are simple, but we've tried to give each character a personality to match background and ethnicity. It was exciting to present the final design. After all a subject like diversity and inclusivity can evoke a lot of debate. Discussions did ensue about how representative certain sub groups and we also solicited feedback from representatives of different sub groups.
A helpful dark neighbour was seen by a Moroccan woman as very stereotypical ('the typical helpful Eastern man') and people had some difficulty with a gay couple with no fewer than three children ('not realistic'). We learned a lot about our own prejudices, and how people's designs are read very differently by different target groups.
