Universal Design In Life And Work

Last week I met with a colleague and one of the things that he and I had been discussing on several different occasions is the way in which migration affects our lives. And it's not just our lives as migrants, but the people who we still have relationships with back in our home countries. I'm a migrant myself and so I can reflect on this from a couple of different perspectives. One of the issues that really came down to was that in many cases migrants, especially those who come from disadvantaged underserved or underprivileged backgrounds. When they experience moving to a new country, they tend to. They sometimes adopt those prejudices biases stereotypes and other forms of discrimination that are present in their new home country. And so this is kind of an internalization of a new value system and a value system, that is very problematic.So their view of their home country the country that they came from becomes distorted because they layer different kinds of internal racism prejudice or whatever problematic mindset might emerge within their migrant experience. And so it's been an interesting point of reflection for me because we're talking about someone who comes to a new country and essentially adopts two mindsets. One is their home mindset where the culture they've come up with the value systems that they grew up with and the other is the mindset of their. New adopted home. The mindset of the culture and country in which they live.I used to think about these two mindsets in a way that they were becoming integrated that it's about having your own value system that again is is more or less the value system of your home country and then integrating or maybe layering on top of your existing value system a new value system of the of your adopted country. But in these discussions, I've had with my colleague one of the things that really emerged was that there's not actually an integration of value systems so much as there are two different value systems at play at once.And that those different value systems may come to the front of a person's mindset or their experience. It may influence someone's behavior in different ways depending on the interactions they've had. So, for example, the value system that you have based in your home country the country that you originate from it may only come into play when you're interacting with the people in the the culture within which you you've come from. And so rather than there being kind of,Integrated mindset where you have two value systems become one it's essentially two separate value systems that are almost jockeying for position based on the part based on the experience of the person whose life they they inhabit.And this is a very interesting phenomena I think because it's not a matter of being able to change an existing value system but rather in your an experiencing the world around you being able to kind of multitask or move between those two value systems. And I guess it becomes really problematic whenever the value system of your new country, you're adopted country starts to influence the ways in which you feel about your.Home country or your country that you originate from and I think where this comes to play in particular is when you you're a person might be moving from a socially disadvantaged area to a socially affluent area and that that affluent area might have a value system and in some ways discriminates against or is biased against the the areas that you've come from as a migrant. And so I think it's really important for us to reflect on this and to to really reconsider how we look at our home countries and think not in terms of what they were when we used to live there but more in terms of what they are now and that might be a better place it might be in a very better condition than what it was when we left.

I've been reflecting a lot lately on the idea of self-acceptance and self-empathy. I think it's so important that we move beyond our kind of inhibitions and hang-ups maybe our own personal prejudices and biases to really look inward and try to understand and accept our own worldview as in some ways flawed and in other ways absolutely correct, it's really important that we don't only look critically to. Wards others but we look critically towards ourselves and be more reflective about our choices and about the decisions we make and in doing so we don't automatically apply that same lens of negative criticism towards ourselves that we might apply in other aspects of our life this is because your own self-worth is really determined by how you how that internal monologue kind of takes shape and being able to express empathy. Take time for empathy with yourself can be really critical especially in times of turbulence and difficulty. It's about being patient with yourself and about trying to relate to who you are in a new and different way and that means going beyond just looking at yourself as an enemy or looking at yourself as a problem, but looking at yourself as a joyful and expressive person. And I always try to remind myself that the work that I do the work that people in my field are doing I this has been a very short amount of time and abroad scheme of things and that we can be patient in our exercise of diligence and of pushing the envelope. I if this is not meant to this is not about being complacent this is about moving forward, but being empathic that the, Jury were on has only recently begun it was only maybe a hundred 150 years ago that our human rights kind of became enshrined and. We have to understand that although there's still that's still over a century that we've been working on some of the really critical issues in society that it's not going to happen overnight and that we have to be patient and again I kind of remind myself that yes 150 years ago, we got human rights and in a hundred million years ago 200 million years ago, there were dinosaurs and so we've come a long way as an evolutionary terms so I think as we continue to push the envelope as we continue to move society forward as we continue to focus on. Growth. Within sustainable development and tackle critical issues that are around us that we are patient that we are empathic with ourselves and that we look at the world through a critical lens, but a lens of understanding and compassion.

So I have been working the last several weeks trying to finalize a very large-scale project that I recently had funded. And one of the absolutely mind-melting things that I've had to go through is dealing with this multiple layers of administrative bureaucracy that kind of surrounds this process and I understand bureaucracies meant to control things and to create a system of accountability and quality. Assurance. You know, I I get this. The challenge that we're facing is that our bureaucratic systems are so convoluted and at times so conflict-oriented and and in some ways just in conflict with each with itself that achieving the end goal which in this case should simply be an acting and and and implementing a worthwhile impactful project becomes. Not just arduous and not just painful but it becomes a laborious and exhausting so that by the time you get to the starting line, you're already beat down and in it the whole project or the work that you're you're undertaking is is the mindset that you have going into this is just to get it done. And I think we have to kind of reinvent our bureaucratic systems and ask ourselves really start to question are they effectively doing what we expect them to do.Or are they in fact just kind of designed in a way that they become layer upon layer upon layer of administration. So cutting through that in a way that can effectively not only become more efficient but become actually more satisfying for all the human beings who are involved. I think that's going to be one of the critical challenges that we face in the future. You know, we've we've come out of an age late 20th century and then even in the 19th century where we built these admin. Istrative systems not only in government but in in industry and in civil society and throughout all of the daily life we've built these layers and layers of administration in order to help organize society, but I think the next stage of our societal development really has to find ways of becoming a little bit more agile becoming a little bit more network kind of getting a getting rid of some of the hierarchies that exist that become bottlenecks and finding new ways. Leading to each other finding new ways of restoring trust finding new ways of ensuring accountability transparency and all the other things that we know are fixtures and our necessary for modern life.

I think empathy is a really critical part of the things we do when it comes to creating technology. It's one of the most fundamental aspects of communication and relating to other people and collaboration. And what this essentially means is that we can't operate from the assumption that people are going to immediately connect with the message we're trying to say before we've been able to kind of emotionally connect with their state of mind and their presence. And I think one of the real easy ways of doing this is to find a length.For defining your own feelings and being able to say very clearly. I feel happy sad upset angry disappointed frustrated I and then also to be able to see other people's needs when they're expressing their feelings. So if they're coming to us and saying, I feel upset what is it that they need in order to be able to clearly understand a bit more about their state of mind. So when we're working on things like creating new technologies.It's not enough to just work in a team and communicate what needs to be done. You need to be able to communicate with other human beings. And I think this is a critical component of how we address how we address the tech industry how we address moving forward with what we what we know of as software engineering hardware engineering all of these disciplines all these fields can benefit from a greater understanding of human empathy. And I think that we have to move.Well beyond just this input output mentality where we are given a set of requirements and we work on those requirements and we communicate those to others and then we try to find a way of solving these problems in these challenges ahead of us. It's really about the human human interaction as much as the output of the engineering process. And so,For those that work in the tech industry and for those who might be studying computer science or electronic engineering getting a good language good emotional language being able to identify adequately and express your own feelings can be a critical opportunity for you to be a better a better engineer a better collaborator a better partner a better person with whom people have to work in order to create the next and greatest piece of tech out there.

I'm an action researcher, a social entrepreneur and an equality advocate. I use universal design principles to connect what I do with why I do it.