Adam Fujita Thesis Book XENO by Adam Fujita

xeno From the Foreign to the Familiar

Adam Kiyoshi Fujita

Copyright 2016 by Adam Fujita All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Adam Kiyoshi Fujita

For inquiries contact afujita1@sva.edu

Hossannah Asuncion

School of Visual Arts MFA Products of Design 136 West 21st Street NY, NY, 10011

Author and Designer

Editor

Allan Chochinov Chair, MFA Products of Design Thesis Advisor

Andrew Schloss Thesis Advisor

Table of Contents

Introduction

8-31

Goals and Objectives

32-39

Previous Work

40-57

Methodologies

58-65

Research

66-101

Audience

102-107

Lenses

108-303

Impacts

304-311

Looking Forward

312-317

Bibliography

318-319

Citations

320-321

Lexicon

322-323

Acknowledgements

324-325

INTRODUCTION

Chapter One

Introduction Simple Definitions Xenophobia noun: zen-uh-foh-bee-uh w.[1] Currently in these Unites States of America we have over 11.5 million immigrants in our towns and communities. We are a nation that for centuries has defined its sense of self on the premise that we are the great liberators of the world. We have been the first to tout our efforts as a force of good for the down trodden and the needy. At the base of the Statue of Liberty millions of immigrants arrived on our shores and read the portion of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus” as imprinted on the Statue of Liberty [2] where she eloquently wrote “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” I can only imagine the power of reading these words after traveling so far and so long to reach the land of the free and the home of the brave; to have discovered during the days of the great migrations of the 1880’s to the 1930’s that it was indeed a place where one could be sheltered and housed unconditionally. In my life, compassion and love has been a constant building block of life.

INTRODUCTION

At the same time, I wasn’t taught to trust strangers. I was in fact encouraged to be skeptical of them. On the other side I was always taught that foreign people were one of the strengths of our nation.

Personal Design Ideology

INTRODUCTION

The current temperature around immigration in the United States is high. We are entering a new phase of intensified skepticsm, fear and unfounded hate of a status of people that was once so positively tied to America’s identity of compassion and acceptance.

Throughout my life I have worked as an actor, a master bicycle mechanic and many years in the hospitality and food industry. Through my years in all of those industries the products I was producing was focused on customer satisfaction and I knew that the biproducts were highly functioning objects and happy customers. As I made the difficult decision to go back to school and pivot to product design I realized that these concepts of satisfying the user were aligned with my personal principles. Another factor in my ideology is my family. My wife and I had a daughter as I began school and thinking of the future that my child will live in is motivation enough to try and make a difference.

The people of our communities I have known undocumented and immigrant people my whole life. It has been my personal honor to have had relationships with people from Africa, The Middle East, Cenral and South America and beyond. I have seen first hand the challenges it takes to be a person without documentation, community, support and resources. These relationships have become the backbone for the work I have been doing in my thesis year. For centuries, the world’s downtrodden and needy have turned to The United States of America for its offer of better opportunities. We have embraced this as our identity; quick to tout our efforts as a force of good for those fleeing issues like persecution, famine and war. But as immigrants arrive with hope, a fear and hatred can develop among selfidentified nationals.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Donald Trump

INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

Thesis Madlib At the tail end of our first year in the Products of Design department we were issued a thesis madlib worksheet by our thesis advisors. This was an interesting chance to play around with what thesis topic we may or may not want to work on in the second year. We are given two or three and are encouraged to go for the bizarre and non-traditional just to see where we might land. I wrote a few around communication, one was about how graffiti and street art create strong social circles and one on the importance of street theatre on subway platforms. I also wrote one with concern to immigration and refugees. There was much in the news in March of 2015 around refugees and I was assurprised as the whole world was when in the summer of 2015 the European migrant crisis took over our radio stations and newspapers. I felt helpless and needed to do something. While I read many books over the summer on topics wide ranging, I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t shake the idea of designing for immigrants and refugees. As I have stated before and will again in this book I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to design at such a great distance for fear of not being able to do the topic justice. My entire life however I knew that immigration issues and particularly the situations that undocumented people faced was of the utmost importance. I have felt honored at several points this year to have been able to serve this community by trying to create products and services that could bring some more comfort to their lives. I continue humbly though this work and hope to continue long after I graduate.

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INTRODUCTION

Where and when did we take this detour from our old character trait of acceptance and compassion? Where will it take us? Will we be better off? Do we really believe that fearing homeless people, foreigners, people of different faiths or immigrants will make us a better people or a stronger nation?

Why me? I have a very strong personal connection to this thesis and for me and it is multi-layered. My personal family history and experience have added to this thesis tremendously. I am half Japanese, the son of a Sansei or third generation Japanese American. His parents were of the Nisei or second generation Japanese American, and interned during World War II.

INTRODUCTION

Gaman: enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity Smithsonian Institute

In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that subsequently deported 120,000 Japanese American citizens to designated internment camps. father, grandparents, among them. They were native Californians, born and raised. My grandparents, my father, all my aunts and uncles and many cousins were systematically

rounded up along with 120,000 others due to executive order 9066 and taken from their homes and from all they knew. The order that Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed that subsequently interned over 120,000 Japanese American citizens and aliens was a grave mistake. A mistake that has since been noted as the single greatest injustice inflicted on US citizens in all of history. From 1942 to 1946, Japanese Americans lived in internment camps. My family lived at the Amache internment camp in Granada, Colorado for almost 2 and a half years. After the war and upon returning to California and other west coast states many Japanese American people experienced years of continued discrimination.

INTRODUCTION

The internment of Japanese Americans is now recognized widely as a bureaucratic and political mistake, and has been noted as the single greatest injustice inflicted on US citizens in all of history. At the rate we are going now might we repeat this type of travesty? Is it so inconceivable that it could never happen again? These are the types of questions I have thought of throughout my childhood and during my time in grad school.

The Fujita family at the Amache Internment Camp in Granada Colorado. Gary Fujita. Nancy Fujita. Dennis Fujita. Ann Fujita. Bill Kashiwase and Henry Fujita. 1943 and 1944.

INTRODUCTION

I have spent a good deal of time wondering and musing what this must have been like. Imagine being distrusted and feeling like a stranger in your hometown. My personal experience as a Japanese American, while mostly positive, was and is still fraught with racism through a veil of micro aggressions, bigotry and ignorance. I have felt isolation from the experiences of being differentiated. I see the current migrant crises and our state of xenophobia around the world and here at home to be of the utmost importance. I also believe that our current attitude towards immigrants both documented and undocumented is unhealthy and dangerous. The parallels to the treatment of the Japanese American and the immigrant populations of today are striking. As Greg Robinson stated in his book After Camp; “The US government’s policy of forcible removal smashed Japanese communities, while the mass incarceration of their residents without charge or proof of guilt subverted the camp inmates’ ethnic identity and solidarity, leading to widespread trauma and interpersonal conflict within the camps.”[3] I am a mixed-race Japanese American and because of this some of those in the Japanese American community do not readily recognize or acknowledge me as Japanese. I was often told, “You’re not really Japanese.” There was also a particular childhood incident in which another neighborhood boy called me a racial slur. As I child I did not have the resources to understand the cruelty of casual racism and the impact of that moment was deep. To this day these experiences recall all the emotions of those moments and is one aspect that informs the work I want to produce.

Fujita Family tree. Planted by my grandfather Henry Fujita in Granada Colorado on the site of the Amache Internment camp. Cement foundation of the barracks my family lived in during incarceration in the foreground

INTRODUCTION

But my Japanese background is also filled with beautiful design. I learned of the elegant aesthetic of my Japanese heritage along with an awareness of craftsmanship because of Japanese artists. I am proud to be part of a line of strong and independent makers, artists, and engineers.

people are not always people of color—that people from countries with predominantly white populations can and do immigrate to the United States. I have also had to challenge dominant beliefs and language around undocumented people

Reflecting on my own experiences, my family’s history, and current attitudes about immigration I find the parallel of the treatment of Japanese Americans in the past and the immigrant populations of today striking.

I quote several conservative voices in this book highlighting the rhetoric I believe that is unjustly fanning the flames of xenophobia.

Political instability and conflict have created a global migrant crisis and with it a new phase of xenophobia worldwide. Current attitude towards immigrants both documented and undocumented is unhealthy and dangerous. Conservative political leadership, which will be referenced within the thesis, is important to highlight for the contribution of its rhetoric to the escalation of xenophobia. This book is a compilation of this past two semesters of my thesis work. The current election cycle for the next President of the United States is saturated with xenophobic rhetoric and intolerance. Listening to the Republican and Democratic presidential debates it is imperative for us to address immigration issues and the racism that is resulting from it. As I write this passage, my thesis is still growing. It will continue to grow. Ironically the process, itself, has been strange and foreign to me.

Political and social problems are difficult to discuss, but without discussions there is no way to address ignorance with information. There are particular challenges to addressing racism and bigotry within academia. I have had to clarify my work and the decisions around my work. For example, I had to clarify that undocumented and that they are not all “undocumented workers.”

This semester I have focused my thesis work to develop solutions for the issues of access to resources that immigrant populations face. Initially, I looked at disaster and crisis related situations that caused displacement of adults and children such as . I then examined the United States foster care system and transitioned the final focus to New York City’s undocumented population.

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INTRODUCTION

Why I Care As I stated earlier my wife and I had a baby daughter 11 days before my first day of graduate school. I often use my daughter as a litmus test. Would I feel okay with putting this object or product into the world? Would she approve? My family is the most important thing to me. I wanted to make a difference for them. Faculty is shaping us into incredible design thinkers answering questions like, How will we solve for this? Questions like that precede the answers that we will provide our children. Products of Design is not just in the business of designing for consequence but it is also in the “better person” design service.

INTRODUCTION

undocumented community as a way to show them support and as a way to empower them as a community. The days of them living in shadows will them living in shadows will one day be just a memory. the narrative that we all know of undocumented people is changing. The one that I will tell my daughter might be less confusing. Let’s start a new narrative. One that children will easily understand..

My time here has made me a better person, a better husband and a better father. Classes like “Affirming Artifacts” taught by Allan Chochinov assign projects like redesigning a disposable object and that our choices as designers are important and complicit. This insight leads back to my responsibility as a designer—I do not want the products I design to be part of a polluted world my daughter will need to clean. As I write this passage, my thesis is still growing. It will continue to grow. Ironically the process, itself, has been strange and foreign to me. My daughter is also not yet aware of xenophobia or the experience of prejudice of undocumented people. That conversation will be hard. There is no rationalization, in my opinion, to explain how one group of people have legislated discrimination against another group of people.

Conclusion. Part of being a designer is taking chances. For the purpose of this thesis, there is the risk, reward, and insight of empathy. Empathy is one way to respond to abstractions like fear. The work that I am doing in my thesis year of grad school is multi faceted. I am hoping to create product and services for the

“Islam control would include banning Syrian refugees from the U.S., accepting only Christian refugees in the future.” Don Feder

INTRODUCTION

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

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INTRODUCTION

Chapter Two

Goals and Objectives The goals of this thesis involve multiple moving parts. Primarily I hope to design a suite of objects, platforms, services and experiences that will create more support for the undocumented community and their stakeholders. The opportunity to bring some of these designs into the real world and to break the wall of “class project” will hopefully present itself. I believe acceptance and a lack of expectations will create a more care-based society that will support more people in the future rather than less. I’m also hoping to discover personal growth opportunities while learning about and processing my own family’s experiences. There had to be a personal discovery component to my work or the work would be inauthentic. I also hope to gain more empathy for this ever growing immigrant population in our country. We need a better understanding of the products and services they need to begin reducing some of the fear and anxiety that has become a common part of their daily operations A recent study published by the United States Customs and Border Protection, the largest federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security released data in their Southwest Border Unaccompanied Alien Children’s Statistics FY 2016 that revealed that over 58,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children or UAC’s were apprehended attempting to cross the Mexican / US border in 2014. [4]

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Based on this finding, one of the objectives within my thesis was to create tools that could be adopted by these kids and their families in order to make their lives more comfortable and productive. These tools I intend will make their migration a smoother and less dangerous one. Another reason that this thesis means so much to me is the importance I have placed in my core relationships with others and in learning how to better nurture those relationships, making them last. In turn through my thesis work I hope to discover some of the key components to fostering and nurturing a healthy relationship with my neighbors and friends.

The End? In conclusion, my goals of investigating where my design interventions will have the greatest impact and how they will be received is still to be determined however I believe that they can best be tested through iteration and further research and development. Conclusion

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Design objects need to follow the same social rules as people.â&#x20AC;?

Results and outcomes of my design interventions and their impacts is a work in progress. However, early results show that not only this an important area of study but it is also more timely than ever. I will later explore economic, social, and political impacts of the products and services that I am creating. Current feedback has thus far been positive and encouraging in terms of the direction of my thesis work. After applying the user centered design techniques that I learned from IDEO in my first year of grad school I plan to take my learnings that are relevant to my users needs and habits to make products that serve them directly.

Ajay Revels

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INTRODUCTION GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

PREVIOUS WORKS

INTRODUCTION PREVIOUS WORKS

Chapter Three

Previous Works

The marks we leave. Several of my users who have undocumented status communicate feelings of feeling invisible. I believe this influences their disenfranchisement and alienation from obtaining products and services that would have benefited them. I have had experiences that help me to understand this type of thinking. It gives me confidence that I can help communicate their needs. Most of my life, as an artist and as a performer, in one way or another, I have simply been trying to make myself heard. What I have been trying to do in grad school is to look introspectively and to attempt to find something in myself that could help narrate my ideas and translate them with some sort of clarity. What I have been trying to do in grad school is to look introspectively and to attempt to find something in myself that could help narrate my ideas and translate them with some sort of clarity to benefit others. During my first year at SVA there were several projects that have acted as a pre-cursor to the work of my thesis. I say this because they align with the intentions of helping the underdogs even if by pushing back on the powers that be.

PREVIOUS WORKS

INTRODUCTION

Deconstruction/Reconstruction, One of the goals of that course was to, as Ayse would say, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Design the life you love.â&#x20AC;? I gravitated to this idea as I have been unconsciously designing the life that I love. I felt a kinship to Ayse and her philosophy. I appreciated the exposure to someone whose philosophy further helped me define my own guiding principals. I built a set of 12 tree whistles and invited a group of non-musicians to make music from an unexpected instrument to create an unconventional sound. One objective was to create a design experience so that all participants had the same level of skills to make music or sounds together. Additionally, there was an empty place holder for a 13th whistle, symbolizing the ability to add another piece to the set. The empty space was also a gesture to represent future experiences of hope and possibilities.

PREVIOUS WORKS

Point of View, Taught by Rob Walker In this class we were challenged to redesign something that is invisible in the public sphere. The ubiquitous locksmith stickers found all over cities in the US and beyond often caught my attention. I found a tempting paradox between vandalism and of a service provided here. These provide a service when most needed, i.e., when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re locked out of your home. However, by placing the stickers on private property these companies were breaking the law.

INTRODUCTION

Inspired by that gray area between vandalism and service I felt compelled to address the fast fashion industry, specifically the manufacturers that were responsible for the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh that killed and injured over 3500 workers. [5] Many of these American retailers including H&M and the GAP have yet to pay their share of the settlement for the victimsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; families. I wanted to provide a public opportunity to condemn immoral business practices and corporate negligence. I learned through my research that many people what to say something but they are afraid to literally say it. The Paradox Sticker Set helps with this impulse. The final assignment of this class was to present the project through the lens of a Kickstarter campaign. In the video for the campaign I demonstrated how the Paradox Sticker Set should be used. The user would receive the packet of stickers in the mail. Once received, you could take your set into the field. The pack came with 4 stickers. Two of which brought attention to retailer irresponsibility.

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INTRODUCTION

Once received, you could take your set into the field. The pack came with 4 stickers. Two of which brought attention to the responsibilities being shirked by the retailer. By placing the sticker on the public and visible facade of the retail store, it would mostly stay camouflaged, keeping them mostly invisible by design, but when noticed, would be informative. Small as these stickers may be they have power and most importantly influence if and when noticed.

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METHODOLOGY

Chapter Four Methodology

“It’s fine to design something wrong, as long as you understand what can be done better or how it can be improved.” Marie Bachoc

The methodology of this thesis was not only to conduct both primary and secondary research over the course of two semesters but to reach out further through experiences and workshops. The primary research was begun the summer before second year with as many books as I could consume. And in reading as much as I was able to do many possibilities of directions began to present themselves as well as many different other models of design. Growing up with my Japanese American family’s experience of internment I have been conducting my own form of personal research on fear, xenophobia, and on the distrust of people. I questioned why an entire nation of people would accuse 120,000 Japanese American citizens of the possibility of treason. There was nothing to back up these claims other than fear and hysteria. The methodology of the Products of Design Department is what brought me to study here. In the 2 year MFA program we are indoctrinated by our departments ethos that we are not in the artifact business anymore but as conscious designers concerned with the future of our communities and of the planet that we are in the consequence business. This ideology is a concept that I try to ground all of my work in as often as is applicable. In the following chapters namely the Lenses chapter I have strived to maintain this idea when doing the interaction and intervention design work as well as whenever I have designed a product/service pairing. As mentioned before, prior to the first semester of my Thesis year I consumed as

METHODOLOGY

material as I could on my thesis territory. This included watching TED talks, reading books, articles online, creating a media bubble in the attempt at receiving daily updates as to what was happening in the undocumented and immigrant community as well as beginning to put my feelers out and try to talk to people that I knew personally that were related to this target user group. We draw a lot in our department. Sketching through ideas to het to a place where we can make things for our users is critical. We ran through a series of design sprints that I will detail in the following chapters. These were all 1 week sprints where we imagined our thesis topic as a Service, an App, a Social Change and an ad Campaign. We conduct a Futuring Workshop where we assemble a group of friends and family members to design future products for our users based on a set of guidelines.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.â&#x20AC;? Ann Coulter

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RESEARCH

METHODOLOGY

Chapter Five

Research Research Strategy Growing up with my Japanese American familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience of internment I have been conducting my own form of personal research on fear, xenophobia, and on the distrust of people. I questioned why an entire nation of people would accuse 120,000 Japanese American citizens of the possibility of treason. There was nothing to back up these claims other than fear and hysteria. When I began working on this thesis topic, I transitioned from displaced people to foster children to looking into the homeless population of New York City and undocumented immigrants. While I read much on my thesis territory I also spoke with experts in several different fields through phone and in-person interviews which had the greatest influence on my work to date. When it comes to undocumented immigrants in America, I believe that they have had less opportunities and have had to start 50 feet behind the starting line, constantly in a struggle to keep up with their peers. The research process has not been linear as interviews have informed my studio work and my studio work has informed my interviews. Richard Nisbett, in his book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, wrote that â&#x20AC;&#x153;Behind many a successful person there are a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about.â&#x20AC;? [6] I believe that undocumented people deserve these lucky breaks but are constantly struggling to stumble across them.

RESEARCH

Interviews with Experts Phone interviews were conducted with over 30 field experts. I was never disappointed with my interviews. In fact almost every single call provided amazing insight. I gravitate towards one on one conversations with people in order to gain more insight, develop more empathy and create a richer fabric of experiences in order to guide my decisionmaking as a designer. I quickly learned from my first few phone interviews that my experts were leading me down paths I had not anticipated. This process was exhilarating and I continue to do interviews while I am writing this. Through my phone calls, I spoke with leading designers, design researchers, NYC Governmental Directors,

RESEARCH

Mary Beth Albers Special Ed Itinerant Teacher Interactive Therapy Group Sigi Moeslinger Founder Antenna Designs Vhidi Goel Design Researcher and Strategist IA Collaborative

Sahil Berk Ilhan Chief Design Officer 10XBeta John Donovan MD Doctors Without Boarders Rachel Wiltenberg Hearst Physical Therapist DPT Langone Medical Center NYU

RESEARCH

Marie Bachoc Senior Experience Designer R/GA

Ingrid Fetell Lee Design Lead IDEO NYC

Lucy Knops Partner and Founder at Critter Bitters

Madeline Guyer Special Eductaion Teacher UCISD Uvalde TX

Tiffany Chen Communications and Disorders Department NYU

Emilie Baltz Experiential artist and educator

Carla Diana Robot Maker carla Diana Designs

Rodrigo Camarena Mixteca Organization

Ishac Bertran Interaction Designer Google Creative Labs

Talisa Hayes Early childhood educator The Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Center Loyola Marymount University

Ani Shabazian Director: The Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Center Loyola Marymount University

Beatriz Gil Hibridos Collective

RESEARCH

immigration lawyers, child psychologists, physical therapists, early childhood educators, strategists and entrepreneurs. Early on in my research, I spoke with Ani Shabazani, the director of the Children Center at Loyola Marymount University when I was doing research on children in the Foster Care system and something she said really stunned me: “Even where resources are more available children and poor foster care have been shown to more likely develop behavioral educational and emotional problems in children who are raised by abusive and high-risk parents” [7] leading me to the insight that separating parents from their children can do much more harm than good even in a high-risk home. After speaking with Rodrigo Camarena, the director at the New York City Department of small business services, I had my interest piqued about undocumented people in New York City. Rodrigo is one of the founders of the Mixteca Community Center which is a center in Sunset Park Brooklyn that is run and operated completely by undocumented New Yorkers from Latin America. One of their key goals among other things was “building a strong cultural identity”.[8] That cultural identity is one of the components that led me to several of my design interventions this semester most notably the “I B New York” campaign that I created highlighted near the end of this book. I continued my phone research while reading as much as I could and I had the fortune of interviewing AJ Revels, a strategic design researcher and the creator of Polite Machines here in New York City. Among many inspirational quotes in our interview, AJ reminded me that “humans are desperate to communicate with each other” [9]. This idea of communication has opened my thinking to some of the products and services that I hoped to design during my final semester.

RESEARCH

Ingrid Fetell Lee from IDEO encouraged me to “Look at affordances. What are the affordances of an object? The simpler the object the more affordances it has. The more complex the object the more restrained the affordances become because it’s been designed a certain way” [11]. Speaking with Ingrid led me down many avenues of thought most importantly the one of keeping my work as simple as I could. Coupling that simplistic theory I also wanted to touch on common sense and kindness. Richard Fausett wrote on Governor Pat McCrory of Durham, North Carolinas attempt at signing a bill prohibiting so called Sanctuary City policies. He quotes Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez as saying, “It will cause individuals to flee the police, on the belief that some minor incident is going to get them deported” [12]. Much of my early research throughout this semester was around mentorship and the possibilities that a good mentor and mentee relationship can do for both parties. Emilie Baltz brought me her ideas of the power of mentorship in two components: first, mentees “are lost--they don’t feel like they have a group or a connection, an idea, a model,” secondly, she elaborates that mentors “immediately create a sense of community even if it’s just one on one. So you feel like, I belong to this. There is a way forward. I feel empowered in my life. I feel accepted” [13]. 40% of a teenager’s day is spent without adult supervision. [14] This is believed to be increased in marginalized teens. In order to have more successful kids we need to create more opportunities for mentoring relationships. The undocumented community cannot be forgotten.

Sanctuary Cities Most of my life I have lived in sanctuary cities. Both San Francisco and New York City along with 326 counties and 32 cities in the US, limit local law enforcement involvement in federal immigration enforcement.

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The phrase “sanctuary city” was born out of the church center and movement in the late 70s. In an article published by ImmigrationPolicy. org the term sanctuary city is used to describe community policing policies which attempt to eliminate fear from those who were either reporting a crime or interacting with local law-enforcement could result in deportation. I was very surprised to find out how few of the people I have spoken with had even heard of sanctuary city provisions. This led me to several design interventions including my service design which included an app and also my social change which is developing into a business with a website and numerous intel hacking apps, detailed later in the lenses chapter.

Interviews with Undocumented People I have been fortunate enough to interview several undocumented and recently-documented people. These interviews provided the most insightful information to support my design work. This is been the most insightful for me and has brought me the most clarity on the directions in which I should be moving with regards to my design work and with regards to the narrative that I hope to create throughout my thesis year. In particular I spoke with “Gaspar.” Gaspar and I worked together many years ago at a café in midtown Manhattan will be developed a friendship and come rotary. At that time Gaspar had been away from his wife and two children for approximately seven years and he did not have the ability to communicate easily with them. I had just upgraded to a new computer so I offered Gaspar my old MacBook and set him up with an email account and a Skype account and taught him and his wife how to use Skype. This was a simple gesture it was small and I was happy to do this for my friend.

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Years later in fact during this semester that I’m writing this I reconnected with Gaspar and throughout our first interview he gave me a very strong insight where he said that in his “11 years now in America no has ever shown me kindness”. This has really stuck with me and I have been utilizing that insight to design several artifacts and experiences. I asked Gaspar about his community and essentially he told me that he doesn’t have one. He has roommates and co-workers and a cousin who lives in New Jersey that is directly related to his wife but he doesn’t feel he has much of a community. Also through this interview process Gaspar told me how undocumented people in his perception are invisible to the rest of the city and how they are look down upon as well. This saddened me and it fortified my resolve and made me confident that the work I am doing now is necessary is at a critical point and is pertinent. I was very surprised to find out how few of the people I have spoken with had even heard of sanctuary city provisions. This led me to several design interventions including my service design which included an app and also my social change which is developing into a business with a website and numerous intel hacking apps. I’ve also been able to interview several advocates for undocumented people including Beatriz Gil who along with her partner who own and operate Hibridos Collective in Jackson Heights Queens. The collective emerged out of the need to find other artists activist and concerned residence in the neighborhood to create a thriving creative community. As it says on their website. They also include that part of the re imagining of the neighborhood required thinking about where artists could gather to practice and showcase their art which meant addressing the need for space.

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I find this to be a fascinating intersection figuratively and literally of community and art and I hope to do further research on this kind of work in the future. The website continues with every does collective soon realize the possibilities for creating place and space making related to public art and cultural programming. This intrigue me even further especially this idea of cultural programming. It turns out that Beatriz Gil herself was an undocumented immigrant moving from Mexico City to San Diego when she was a child and knows firsthand the fears and the shame that can be associated with being an undocumented person in a community of people who are not like you. Beatriz told me that when she was growing up there were groups that you could become a part of to create identity. These groups could be gangsters or cholo’s or surfers or jocks or nerds. She told me she decided to be the nerd and it has served her very well she eventually gain her citizenship in 2007 and has since been doing advocacy work for marginalized people using art and space as a tool to help to create identity and to raise awareness about cultural issues.

Analysis of interview experience I was amazed at the breath of experience that my experts had and often times the work might not have been directly related to my thesis. However, their perspectives were always fascinating. I was guided by trust when doing my interviews and despite the hesitation that my interviewees sometimes had with their referrals not being “the right person,” I encouraged these suggestions. I explained that my thesis did not have a solid direction and that I was open to exposure. This was encourage behavior by the chair of my department Alan Chochinov and my other thesis advisor Andrew Schloss as well as several other classmates

and former alumni of the department.

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The experts, particularly, Ani Shabazani and Rodrigo Camarena provided insight about undocumented adults and children, whereas AJ Revels and Ingrid Fetell Lee provided information about design. Through my interview with Ani Shabazani, the director of the Children Center at Loyola Marymount University information that unaccompanied alien children crossing the border by themselves are experience trauma from separation from their parents and migration. This also stimulated my thinking about how much the United States government is always communicating with other countries through the actions that they take. Notably they have rescued and transported people from high-risk settings in foreign countries to our shores. In an article written by Amanda Levinson she states that ...”in the United States for example from 1960 to 1962, the government coordinated Operation Peter Pan in which Cuban families who were opposed to the Castro government sent nearly 14,000 children to Miami. In 1975, the US funded Operation Baby List, placed an estimated 3000 orphaned Vietnamese children with adoptive parents in the United States and around the world. [10] We currently have drug cartels and corrupt governments all around Latin America and other parts of the world essentially torturing their citizens while we are sitting on our hands seemingly unwilling to go in and do something aggressive.

Design Having no formal design training before coming to SVA I am living on a razors edge at all times. This has terrifying and exciting. It is one of the most powerful components of all of my work in the Products of Design department. I truly have not known what I was doing most of the time.

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The razors edge that I referred to was sharp and unforgiving at times but it also forced me to keep moving and to never get too comfortable. Comfort, in my life, has become one of the key components to complacency and the less comfortable I am the more generative and productive I can be. We were assigned in the first week of thesis one to develop some sketch models that would begin to highlight the direction we were hoping to take. I relished this moment and felt happy that this is how I was going to be using my time. Just have research for me tens to feel disconnected and dry but being able to work with my hands and make models and objects that would serve my thesis was enjoyable This first semester I have had the pleasure of designing a cocreation workshop with elements of futuring. I have designed a social change that involved some highly sensitive and illegal disruptive technology. I designed a suite of additional products. Including an IOS app and I worked on two different services. All of this has happened in the first 3 months of the thesis year. One of my personal goals was to just be able to deliver all of the assignments on time. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m happy to say that I have. In the second semester of thesis we move on to individual projects or where everything is thesis-based. We have a Thesis 2 course taught by Abby Covert, where we learn to use information architecture to make sense of all of the work we are processing. Designing for Multiple Screens taught by Brent Arnold and Business Modeling taught by Janna Gilbert of Luminary labs in NYC. We have an Experience Design course titled Design Delight taught by the one and only EmIly Baltz. All of these classes are run through our individual thesis filter and are intended to serve our target users and stakeholders.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;In the 11 years that I have been in the United States no one has ever shown me any kindnessâ&#x20AC;? Gaspar H.

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Sketchnoting I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite sure how to fit my sketchnoting into this book so I decided just to add a section here. Throughout both years at the Products of Design department I used this tool as a way for me to process the dense amount of information that I was taking in. Having always been a persistent doodler growing up as soon as I heard the there was such a thing as notating with drawing I was on board. For me this is the best way that I have found to compile all of my own thoughts on paper from either a class lecture, class critique, brainstorming session or iterative workshop. I developed my own style as I went along. Sometimes I have used nothing but icons for a sketchnote, sometimes it is purely graffiti lettering. I have identified certain formulas that you may see here. I grabbed a few notes that were related to either a specific course that was taking place that directly tied into my thesis work such as Business Modelling or Designing for multiple screens. I also included a few sketchnotes from seminar and presentation classes led by Allan Chochinov. These are a bit more of an intimate look at some of the inner workings not only of my own mind and process but into the minds of my classmates and teachers. At least a few of these have products and prototypes from my brilliant classmates and I hope it is alright with them that they are shared here. Either way these are a fundamental tool in the way that I have not only processed information but how I continue to conduct research.

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Who cares. My design work began with displaced people affected by the European crisis, specifically Syrians and Iraqis who are in transition to Europe. While I began the research during the summer of 2015 the migrant crisis was a relevant and current news topic. Even today the crisis continues to develop into a larger ecosystem of political and social instability. Hate groups, as a response to the influx of immigrants and refugees, have been sprouting in European communities that had once seemed tolerant. These communities are now pressuring migrants to evacuate areas of occupation in Turkey, Greece, Germany, and even in progressive countries like Sweden. I eventually moved away from this particular population because I realized very quickly that designing at a distance is flawed and I wanted to be able to have as much impact as I could. But I was influenced by the global issue of migration and, in particular, the discrimination immigrants experience. I wanted to be closer to my users in order to affect real change. Keeping in mind that I was not completely clear on the type of change that I would be able to make in a one year thesis project I knew that the distance was going to become a challenge. I realized that there is a need to raise awareness about undocumented people in New York City right now. I landed on undocumented New Yorkers as a user group which is at least 535,000 people as of spring 2016. However, they were not the only people that I was designing for because here is a whole host of other stakeholders that surround

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my user group--family members of undocumented New Yorkers, in the United States of America, or back in their respective countries. There are friends and colleagues of these undocumented New Yorkers to consider and members within the community that the undocumented people live. I also hope to make an impact at a future point with the governments of the countries that the undocumented people either fled. I believe that all of these groups have a stake in the ultimate success of these people. And I do not want to forget them when making my initial designs and also during my initial research. My family and I personally know several undocumented New Yorkers so our household has much at stake in the success and failure of these friends. From the outset I knew that there would be many skeptics that would have a problem with some of my designs, especially those that empower this marginalized population. In order to better address the issue of xenophobia I am interviewing people who have anti-immigration political views. I’m amazed and almost baffled by a person who supports America and calls themselves a patriot but seems to be afraid of newcomers to this country. I wonder if they know that this country is the single greatest collection of immigrants anywhere on planet Earth.

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Chapter Seven

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“If it’s too smart sometimes, it’s probably not joyful, because it’s too clever and not silly enough.” Ingrid Fetell

Say what you mean. I conducted my work looking through several lenses ranging from speculative objects to a co-creation workshop, service design, a social change, an ad campaign and an app among others. Viewing my thesis through these different lenses challenged my ideas of what the direction of the thesis was and most importantly who the thesis design interventions served best. The result is a suite of design offerings that I hope will honor the focused labor I have conducted as well as all of the investigative work that I’ve done on my topic. The first semester of thesis I have had to design a co-creation workshop with elements of futuring. I have designed a social change that involved some highly sensitive and illegal disruptive technology. I designed a suite of products. I developed an IOS app and I designed two different services. In the second semester I developed a business model around a coloring book dedicated at clarifying undocumented peoples benefits. I created an experience project and developed another app but this one focused at the stakeholders or advocated for undocumented people. By looking at our thesis topic from as many angles as possible and exhausting all avenues of problem solving we are trained to identify where the flaws in our work are presenting themselves. The challenges of staying focused on the user throughout the entire process was rigorous and extremely challenging. I would argue it made for much more engaging work as a final result.

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The things we carry Early in the semester we worked on a few speculative objects. We were to take our research that we had conducted at that point and begin to imagine some products that might best serve our users. Totem Case; I know the power of the seemingly useless items that we carry in our pockets; an object can mean much more than its function. I designed the totem case to be a carrying or display case for valued items.

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Totems contain spiritual or other special value, and I envisioned this being a product that could celebrate the simple. The smallest and most mundane items can often hold the greatest value and tell a powerful story. Art Show; One concept I spent time designing was an art show or an installation piece where many members of a particular group or collective experience not unlike the European migrant crises could tell their stories of transition by showing the items they collected along their way.

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Playtime in the daytime As a father of an 18-month-old daugther I imagined wanting to create a toy for children in crises environments such as those in politically unstable sections of Europe, but a toy with a utilitarian component as well. By day, during play, the top would harvest energy from its movement and then in the evening could be used as a flashlight, a charging device or heat source for the adults in the family.

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This idea of kinetic energy harvesting is not a new one. Fuel cells are currently being developed as we speak that could make this concept a reality. For the purpose of my thesis this was an important exploration for me. The idea of energy harvesting toy that could ultimately turn into a survival device at night is not currently on the market right now and I would be interested in following up on this project after I graduate.

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Process I chose to first address the form of the top and to get away from the tech of the original design. I wanted to make some wooden tops to learn more about the way they move and react to the hand. By going through this exercise of lathing the tops and hand finishing them I developed a closer understanding of the way the object would be used everyday. The power of the toy is in its simplicity. Tops dazzle children of all ages due to their impossible ability to balance themselves. The tops have taken on a larger significance for me in my work as a symbol of balance, beauty, low tech and joy. On the topic of process I wanted to make a note that through my thesis year and my first year I noticed how much joy I would get through the various stages of making. Drawing and drawing even ,ore is a real treat for me. I take much pride in the art of iterating and of reworking an object or prototype. I found that my most comfotable moments tend to be when I am in the shop sanding or polishing an artifact. I think for me it turned out that is the type of designer that I am. A process driven designer. Much more concerned with the richness and quality of the content of the product than the final glossy aesthetic of ot. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get me wrong, I am all for beautiful objects, but I learned rather quickly that my strength is in working through the fidelity of the product as opposed to just focusing on the resolution.

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The SENNIS System The SENNIS System is a speculative object made to give an example to my participants of what a futured object could be. SENNIS is a smart tactile sensory development and gestural correction object that communicates through Bluetooth to a corresponding haptic glove worn by a user thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s is in training. When the user gently strokes and caresses things with the glove on, the SENNIS will emit a pleasant white light that emanates from the center cylinder. This LED therapy will remind a user of the pleasant reaction that is created from gentle contact. When the user is rough or more aggressive the SENNIS will glow red. The red light will indicate aggression and tension to the user and will encourage them to relax.

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As stated earlier, one stage of my research focused on the Sensory Objects used in physical therapy sessions of children in the Foster Care system. I led and participated in a co- creation workshop with several participants. We focused on what the future of these objects would look like and how they would behave. Futuring, as a practice, is a process of thinking about an issue in detail, and then predicting an outcome based on present knowledge. My participants were given a future scenario randomly selected by spinning the wheel of future. This provided them with a social setting, a category of object, two emotions and a physical location. All of the groups were designing in the projected year of 2050. We had a few designers in the room: two kids, under 5 years old, several parents, several early educators and care givers. It was a perfect group of focused and compassionate participants. The out-put was tremendous. They all worked on a narrative for their artifacts and after making for an hour, presented their collaborative works to the group. The following pages highlight this work by presenting the five objects designed and fabricated over the course of my two hour co-creation workshop.

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We had a few designers in the room: two kids, under 5 years old, several parents, several early educators and care givers. It was a perfect group of focused and compassionate participants. The out-put was tremendous. They all worked on a narrative for their artifacts and after making for an hour, presented their collaborative works to the group. I believe that working in the futuring scenario really gave my participants the freedom to play and removed some of the feelings of doubt that can occur when designing something practical. The work remained grounded, critical and passionate. The following pages highlights this work by presenting the five objects designed and fabricated over the course of my two hour co-creation workshop.

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The Conch aka The Talking Stick The Conch was designed by two workshop participants who were interested in the time spent listening to each other in the future. The designers created this as a futuristic hour glass. When you turn the device upside down the air pocket moves at one pace and the marble moves at another. This could be used for several different heedfulness training exercises that could help several different types of users. The designers imagined a forest-city merger. There would be an emphasis on communication and heedfulness needed to be trained. Being in the moment was a particular point of focus for the designers as well as taking time to answer a question and to use all of your senses when listening.

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Fronterra Fronterra Fronterra was designed for the dystopian future we cannot avoid. In this future scenario an affordable care gap has divided us, people have withdrawn into screens and open sourced revolutionaries are prominent. Revolutionaries, like the doctor who created Fronterra, and give the technology away for free. The user of this object would have personal empowerment through information. That knowledge will have created a population of proactive citizens independent of big pharma. Fronterra is a wearable smart mucus to track your physical and mental health. A user would wear this smart object on their arm or leg and is one of many objects used in the future by self-supporting communities.

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The Lovendar The Lovendar is an aromatherapy weapon of the future. In the scenario designed, PTSD becomes more common due to the fallout of World War III and less people are interested in traditional therapies. The designers envisioned an aromatherapy device that also electronically charges the user with the scent, making them a walking aroma â&#x20AC;&#x153;therapy hubâ&#x20AC;? for others to heal from. Due to natural resources in the future, communities have turned to personal and communal rooftop gardening. Autonomous healing is popular as anti-big-pharma sentiment is a common position in this society. The designers of The Lovendar imagined there would be many different types of weaponized health products on the market giving people great amounts of agency and personal control in the future.

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Stink Gun What co-creation workshop with elements of futuring would be complete if the 4 year olds hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t made an elaborate system for a Stink Gun to kill aliens? This multi stage system consisted of an early warning smart phone, a timer and a control panel that would alert you when it was time to use the weapon of stench. In the designers future homes were interconnected for safety as alienation had taken over the planet. While this set of design objects could seem to some people as being silly and childish I believe these young designers touched on a very serious theme of wanting to feel safe and having the agency to be self sufficient. The additional ideo of interconnected homes and the development of community I found particularly inspiring especially when coming from such young minds.

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M-Path The MPath system is a device based on a care-giving society in the not so distant future. The physician would wear the object with the tentacles. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worn on the fingers with the long wires hanging down. The patient wears the gold adjustable band. When the doctor brushes the wires over the body part of the patient that is in pain, he or she would actually feel the pains of the patient in their own body. Empathy is the key operational feature of this product. In the designersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; narrative simplicity has become the new and most

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adopted social model and we have returned to a simplified practice of healthcare. strengthening, patience and independence.

Learnings Developing and participating in my co-creation workshop taught me many things. Learning through making is not a revelatory idea for me but

watching it in action was exciting. It was great to see nondesigners stretch themselves and come up with amazing ideas. There were several themes that independently came up from various groups that I continue to incorporate into my work: empathy, care-based societies, community strengthening, patience and independence.

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Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s our city. Currently there is no comprehensive site dedicated to informing undocumented people who live in New York City of their rights. New York City is one of 32 cities in the United States that observe sanctuary city protections. In my research I came across over 25 different websites attempting to present the rights of, benefits to and laws supporting undocumented people. My level of web fluency is proficient to expert, and yet, I found it incredibly convoluted and difficult to find the information that I was looking for and much of the language was legal heavy and inaccessible. Sanctuary is a service that would pair with the IDNYC program which is currently providing every resident of New York City with an official ID. Among other benefits of this service, cardholders can open a bank account or apply easily for assistance programs. When an undocumented

person comes to get their ID they would be added to the Sanctuary data base. The Sanctuary website is established for newly documented and undocumented people to learn more about their rights in New York City. The website will also serve family members of immigrants and other stakeholders. Some of the key features in the service would be an 800 phone number available 24 hours a day and seven days a week. This would be the most accessible option for people to get immediate answers to their questions. I believe that the time of designing that having a phone line would be a welcomed application as opposed to not having a potential option to connect with a human being. From my research and interviews, having a human being you can trust to ask questions in real time is more advantageous than being online.

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However, having the web site and an app would be another option. A partnership with the IDNYC program is a natural pairing. But there are a whole host of additional partners that I have considered working with on this program including the Mayors Fund to Advance New York City, advocacy groups that are based in the various five boroughs, and borough presidents. Federal level agencies were also considered in order to bring policy into the conversation. The goal of both services is to educate and give people a better chance at a high quality of life. There would also be agents at every IDNYC location so that like the phone line there would be a person to answer questions and to begin to build their community. And Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m aware that a better chance at a higher quality of life is a very subjective statement but in the purpose of this project it is of the most utopian idea acceptable.

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Break the Rules The Underground Expressway took inspiration from the safe houses run by Quakers during the days of abolitionism that were called the Underground Railroad. A statistic released by the Department of Homeland Security stated that in the 2014 fiscal year 68,541 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) under the age of 17 were apprehended trying to cross the border between our country and Mexico. [14] Because of this influx, we are in the middle of a nationwide due process crisis in our country’s immigration court system, a system already significantly overburdened and under-resourced. These children, many of whom entered the United States during the unprecedented “surge” in 2014, are now facing adversarial removal proceedings opposed by experienced government attorneys, with only about 32% represented by counsel.[15]

The Underground Expressway on the surface would be a foundation dedicated to raising funds and resources for undocumented kids detained attempting to cross the Mexican/ US border. One goal of fund raising from the Underground Expressway would be to provide legal counsel to 100% of Unaccompanied Alien Children giving them the best chance at expediting the legal process and ensuring that they can move on with their lives. Disruptive Tech. The under belly of the website would be an app that would hack ICE and US Border Patrol security cameras and other high security intel thereby leveling the disadvantages of UACs and providing them with technological favor. There will be a kill switch that would delete the app and all data from a user’s phone, if apprehended. There would also be a live map showing the network of safe houses designated to house and refresh immigrants.

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This project pushed my development because I stopped working within safe parameters. My previous work was very realistic and expected, if not completely pedestrian. I felt like it was an important step for me to push the limits and add race as a factor into my work. I plan on keeping risk as an element of my design career as it gets the strongest reaction from people as opposed to doing work with traditional outcomes.

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As designers our responsibility is to push the limits of the design process. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tend to break the law but with the same space in the confines of my design nothing wrong with me exploring what it would be to make a product or service that isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t completely recognized by a court of law.

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Specultive Objects In our department and in the work of our MFA program we do quite a bit of a speculative design. I enjoy this type of work because it allows me to remove the restrictions that are put in place for making products and services operate at a high-level and to abandon this idea that we have to have A particular technology or material to make the product the way that we wanted to function. After doing my work on the underground expressway I began to speculate around this idea of instead of hiding the pathway that millions of people have taken for instant across the South Western Desert Crossing from Mexico and United States that the path should actually be celebrated and seed packet that could be carried by the undocumented Travellers that would be in their pockets and very much like Hantzel and Gretel as a migrant is walking to the desert they can little by little release some of the seeds in their packet to plant flowers along the route for others to follow. This was vision to be a seed packet provided by funds generated to the underground expressway and would be distributed in various countries and in United States to undocumented people those who were planning on migrating and for the stakeholders to advocate for them. The choice of the Indian paintbrush was a specific choice because of its red color being distinct and high contrast of the southwestern desert and due to its history and connection to indigenous people. This package is dormant in a prototype stage but it was an interesting product to theorize around and to craft.

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The Trail “I B NY” is an idea of celebration. It’s a campaign intended to remind people of the contributions immigrant people make to the city on a daily basis and over the centuries. Reappropriating Milton Glaser’s iconic logo seemed like a great opportunity due to its simplicity and recognizability. I believe that immigrants not only helped to physically build our city but they build the cultural fabric of our city that makes people love New York so much. I believe that immigrants ‘Become’ New York, they ‘Bridge’ New York, they are the ‘brand’ of New York, they ‘beautify’ it and they are one of the greatest ‘Benefits’ of New York City and to our great nation as a whole.

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Concept Mapping In my service and entrepreneurship course by Stephen Dean one of many things that I learned from Stephen was an amazing tool--concept mapping and model making. One of the assignments in the course was to create concept maps for pieces and then before the service design project that we would be working on Stevens course for me mapping my thesis is a concept map with enormous undertaking. And I had to begin with identifying a couple of the components of my thesis that I found to be at the heart of much of the problems I am trying to design for. Including fear, xenophobia and exclusion. And I realize that fear is the root of so much darkness in our lives. Fear is at the base of terror, mistrust, ignorance, stigma, anxiety and hate and I realized narratives that I just mentioned are all reinforced through various media outlets. Whether this is right wing rhetoric or so-called liberal news media outlets they love to use fear as a tool to keep people tuning in to listen to the garbage that they are spewing. One of the things that I wanted to focus on was how those media narratives create tension in certain people and in certain social groups and I believe one of the great things that comes out of that tension is civil disobedience. Civil Disobedience has been layered into my work for many many years. Civil disobedience is at the root of my Design Delight project with Emily Baltz and the themes of civil disobedience have come into my work many times throughout my tenure in the products of design department. Within the context of my thesis this disobedience has led to many different variables within my work and it has bolstered ideas of selfesteem, inspiration, education and art. Education on my thesis

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map should actually be a much larger component as bringing clear and accurate information to the undocumented community is at the heart of my thesis work. In the case of my thesis, concept map education breeds tolerance. The core of my work now as a student and in the future as a professional designer is to generate empathy for my users. With empathy we can achieve so much, we realize that through empathy we can encourage care. From empathy we create inclusion, we develop trust, we imply empowerment, we foster compassion, we allow ability and again most importantly we produce tolerance. In this loop within my thesis map lead towards morals and specific moral values and here is an area that I believe designers must be focusing on. Designers for far too long design with morals as some afterthought. As designers and consumers a great responsibility on what weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to buy how weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to buy it how we use those products and services and ultimately how were going to recycle them after weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve used them. All of this is predicated upon having a strong moral compass. One of the morals that I try to live by is having compassion for all people in the case of my thesis I believe the compassion shapes the way undocumented people can see themselves within their communities and in that loop I also believe that undocumented people thrive from that compassion and undocumented people are guided by their identity as are all people.

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A force that overtakes peoples positive ability to do good.

SELF CONFIDENCE

FEAR

Paralyzed by

Amplified by

Prideful understanding of your life goals,intentions and capabilities.

LANGUAGE The set of symbols, words, gestures and actions we use to make those around us understand our intentions and motivations.

Adam Fujita Service Entrepreneurship Concept Map Drawing Service

Information, the pieces of our history and story of the people that came before us that help to deďŹ ne our experience.

KNOWLEDGE

Broken down by

CONFUSION Lack of clarity, magniďŹ ed by the exterior forces that can manifest internally.

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STUDY The art of allowing ourselves the time to focus on a subject that we have deemed worthy of investigating.

Earned through

Born from

LEARNING The capacity to open up all of our senses to absorb other experiences and achievements to help us make healthy choices in our own lives.

Facilitated through Transported by Equalized with

DRAWING The universal act of describing the world around you, your hopes and dreams and fears, through the use of images.

COMMUNICATION The set of symbols, words, gestures and actions we use to make those around us understand our intentions and motivations.

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My research pointed me towards a couple of specific insights that led me to produce the Theory coloring books. The first insight was that children of undocumented parents in the United States tend to be the gate keepers of information for their parents. Often times these American born children are enrolled in school, often times they speak better English than their parents and have more access to resources than their adult counterparts. From this information Theory coloring book service was born. The service would provide a monthly coloring book that would give in explicit detail the steps needed to be taken to access and take advantage of benefits and services intended for undocumented people. New partners would provide the funding for the service and publicity. The core producers of the books would be the Mayors Fund to Advance New York City and a potential partnership with the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Additional issues that could be produced would be with the Affordable Care Act, NYPD detailing how to deal with emergency workers and the IRS on the proper steps needed to be taken to file and pay taxes. The first issue would be sponsored by the IDNYC program which is a municipal ID for all people in New York City/ While there has been much popularity in the ID it still has only been adopted at the point I am writing this by several hundred thousand undocumented people. The issue would have all of the steps clearly illustrated in multiple languages. While these are made in an approachable coloring book format, all the information is accurate and clear. I only had the time to mock up a rough version of this p[product but plan to refine in the summer after I graduate and will be pitching the idea to the Center for Urban Pedagogy and IDEO.ORG as potential real world collaborators.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.â&#x20AC;? C. S. Lewis

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Do bad, for good. The second semester evolved from group projects to individual pieces in support of our thesis. In my designing multiple screens course with Brent Arnold we have learned some incredible things and along the way we have been designing in the case of my thesis in the app that would serve my users. I realized that I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily just wants to design for my target user in this class and that came from an insight from an interview with an undocumented person about the level of risk that they are willing to take. Undocumented people do not want to draw too much attention to themselves for obvious reasons. However my research told me that the stakeholders of the undocumented person might be a little bit more inclined to push the envelope a bit. I began developing an app for that. And the one that I have been refining is an app called Civil Dis. This app came from an idea hacking into digital billboards or other digital screens where information is presented and projecting our own civil disobedience messages portrayed on them.

The inspirations for Civil Dis has many different layers from small glitchy humorous hacks of digital roadsigns to larger groups using their influence to hack larger servers. I did not and do not intend to create an app that would encourage anyone to do anything illegal. At one stage of Civil Dis the user would login and the entire app would be operating on the dark web. Once the user is logged in they will find a menu that will display different options of topics of the user was interested in being disobedient around. So for instance one category might be politics another could be employment another could be undocumented peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rights another could be healthcare. A user would select a category and then select a location for the message to appear which could be a digital billboard in Times Square, the announcement boards on the subway in New York City or a mobile road sign on the side of the public highway or freeway.

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For the presidential election in 2016, Civil Dis could be used to hack into spaces to relate messages contrary to the candidates messages. A user would then send the message to the Civil Dis database and the results would be aggregated. The top most popular message would then be transferred to the most desired locations that were selected. There are a lot of challenges with creating an app like this and in a critique, the use of the dark web to support this app was questioned. Further exploration, influenced my thoughts on design. Developing the app to be used off of the dark web allowed freedom to design an app and to focus on the visual style that I wanted to present as well as the UX in the UI. Keeping in mind the community I wanted to use this, who were diverse and edgy social network types. Instead of a bright design like Facebook I wanted to keep a bit at the darkness and mystery that I felt was an important part of the original concept for the screens. After initially logging into the site you would be presented with multiple different touch points to access areas such as analytics where you could learn about topics that are trending in the moment such as the President of the United States, the presidential election, the Black Lives Matter movement. A user would be able to look at what others were talking about to identify with like-minded people in their community and begin to start looking at some of the messages

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that were being sent to the Civil Dis database. Members could interact with each other, review each other’s profiles and posts, and engage with postings. Users of the app would also be able to choose the locations for where they would ultimately like to have one of their ideas, statements or messages placed. A user would select a venue location from a menu. Again, this would not activate any message placed into that exact location but the third parties who would potentially be using the aggregated results from settled this would know that that’s where you wanted your message placed. The second iteration of the app is very similar to the first one where a user would log in and choose a category, and location for the message. you would choose your location for your message and then you were typing your message and you would send it off and fill out the app others can see what is a popular message that others are trending around but that they would then be accessed by third party at their dark party that would take those results and then do the dirty work. This could be a group like Anonymous or some other hacker cell that would be interested in completing the cycle of civil disobedience and taking the message and making it a reality. A critique of this app is the purpose of the app especially when a thirdparty hacker group could use search results from Google. Traditional use of social media platforms are apathetic and edited versions of selves where honest communications ore expressions violate current social media etiquette. Civil Dis would attempt to occupy this space that I believe is void right now where there is a controlled area to express yourself. Another answer that I have for “why make this app” or “how could it be different” has been related to a detail os the dystopic future narrative that I have created for another one of my classes during thesis, 3DPD2, where Twitter will have been shut down and all information from that network will have been sealed. Civil Dis provides a great opportunity to make a lasting impression and to provide a space where people can communicate freely about the things that are concerning them.

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I have been drawing on Martin Luther King and Gandhi for inspiration throughout the design of this app and this service. I’m reminded of a quote by Martin Luther King where he said, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” This kind of thinking has been moving many different cogs in the machine that is my thesis and I hope to continue down this road confidently.

“If you’re not pissed off you’re not paying attention.” Author Unknown

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3DPD2 For my 3D product design class taught my Sinclair Smith we first looked to the dystopian or utopian future. I initially gravitated towards ideas that were more edgy instead of a more idealistic future. However, I eventually decided a more optimistic future and focused on designing objects to create more harmony for my users. Interviews provided insight around the powerful impact of kindness. So for this class I am working on several different products to serve my use and to be dutiful to their needs and hopes. Through thinking about kindness I began to consider kits as a way to collect and distribute kindness. The contents of the kindness kit were inspired by basic needs such as warmth to luxury items like toiletries from hotel rooms. Potential items for this kit included soap, shampoo, conditioner, face wash, perfume, blanket, clean and dry socks, and a tool that would help create fire. Design Research My vision for the research meeting to ask users how they would design a kindness kit would include dozens of objects in paper silhouettes so users could select items for their kit. The meeting would also include blank paper to draw what was missing. Participants would include direct users or stakeholders of my user group. Typology I began to think intently on what the proper typology for the kit would be. I looked at first aid kits, survival kits, cooking kits, tool sets, fishing tackle boxes, etc. There was a surplus of kits and all the variations to address specific needs. It was overwhelming at first, but then I decided it would be

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We must do everything in our power to keep families together, and to use common sense in our immigration laws. Children deserve better than to lose a parent because of an inflexible law.â&#x20AC;? Jose Serrano

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In the pursuit of discovering my thesis as it could potentially exist in the future in my 3DPD2 course or speculative futuring class with Sinclair Smith I wrote both a dystopian and a utopian narrative of the way I would see my thesis ideas play out. In this future narrative Trump is elected President of the United States. His first order of action is to enact the Muslim Registry Act. There is initial outrage, but the practice is eventually accepted. In this world, the ID bracelets Muslims in the United States are forced to wear become trendy and fashionable with brands like Dior creating collections of Muslim-tracking jewelry. After bracelets there is a natural progression towards necklaces and amulets. I designed a his and hers set of tracking devices. Brand like Nike and Amazon as well as boutique brands like Dior and Tiffany also become drivers for making the tracking devices a way to create more wealth for themselves.

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Faith This the element of survival that I am designing around today for 3DPD2. The taxonomy of the Catholic faith includes rosaries, crucifixes, prayer candles, Milagros and more. I am redesigning and re imagining the prayer candle. When thinking about faith in a family I recalled an insight from an interviewee who, in order to stay connected with his long distance family, spends hours on Skype every week, and exchanges a multitude of texts every month with his family in Mexico. These options are time consuming, such as Skype, or costly, such as texting. The user related that small communications satisfied the missing of family and it was not always necessary to use the phone. With this information Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m designing a set of prayer candles that will connect two users from any distance through WIFI and Bluetooth technology. Two candles are connected, and to communicate affection, one need only to use an app or simple website to turn on the candle for the other person. The other person receives this simple, but significant gesture. The candlelight is modeled after a real candle, but I am also considering customized colors depending on the emotion to be communicated such as red for romance or blue for assurance. Other variables are still under consideration in order to address other needs of the user.

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Keeping families together. This is one of my final projects in grad school. Unfortunately at the time of writing and printing this book it is also an incomplete project. Due to the constraints of the program and the requireme t of having this final thesis book printed I and many of my classmates were unable to complete projects that still occupy a place in our writings. My Lighthouse platform is intended to make the space between people a little bit shorter. I had hoped that by making this lamp that my users would be able to express the care that they have for each other more readily. I plan on producing a set of these candles and giving them to Gaspar H. as a gift and as an extension of kindness to him and his family. As of today the US Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in the United States vs Texas case where 26 states in total are challenging President Obamas mandate to halt deportations on over 4 million undocumented people. The idea of keeping families together seems so simple to me yet many of my fellow Americans thing it is of utmost importance that we break them apart. It is with this idea of family bonding and strengthening that the Lighthouse platform was born. I am aware that this is not a perfect fix, however the more options we provide people the better. I look forward to writing an addition to this chapter after user testing the product and getting their feedback.

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Kindness as protest? The pervasive quality of fear is all around us. Xenophobia is a continuing characteristic of social and individual experiences. In creating the typology for my design experience for Emilie Baltz’s class Design Delight I am keeping mind the concept of protest that has become part of my personal and professional practice. I looked at protest. What are the key components? A common goal, a cause, signage, group setting and a location that is pertinent to the cause. My work has been inspired by Micha White, a creator of the Occupy movement, who has said that, “Protest needs new forms.” I also believe this. The most powerful protests I have witnesses have been silent. Inspired by the civil disobedience demonstrated in the climate march in Paris, I have created, Kind of a Protest. I wanted to investigate kindness as an act of protest after interviewing Gaspar, an undocumented man from Mexico. He mentioned, “In my life in America no one has ever shown me kindness.” The relation of this experience impacted me emotionally and I wanted to further explore kindness through a lens of design: What are the mechanics or kindness? What is the taxonomy of kindness? Where can those who have been shown kindness advance to as opposed to those who haven’t been shown kindness? I reflected on moments when I have experienced kindness and realized my first experiences were at my birthday parties, and this inspired the idea of celebrating disenfranchised people using the typology of a birthday party. Undocumented people should be celebrated. Celebrating a person is a simple way to remind them that they are considered. Celebrating a person is a way of humanizing which is an aim of the products I am designing for undocumented people. The mechanics of the experience as per how I trialed it went like this. I tested this indoors on a cold night. The final day I planned to be outdoors. The initial plan was that a group of protesters would gather at battery park at the Clinton castle or at the immigrants monument. This location seemed pivotal as a point of immigration for millions of people before Ellis Island was opened.

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However after testing the experience at that location I found it to be a challenging place to speak with people. Most of the people down in Battery Park are tourists that seemed very apprehensive to participate.

Undocumented people and immigrants of all backgrounds have created amazing things in our society. Would that be interesting to know? I wanted the booklet to be a party favor that people take with them.

After so strategic planning Union Square in the heart of Manhattan made the most sense as the final location. Union Square has a great history of gatherings, protests and celebrations. This is the perfect place for Kind of a Protest to be performed. The protestors would be given party hats, gifts, protest signs and other props that will create the party atmosphere mixed with celebration. The group will then engage the people passing by with smiles and good vibes. The participants will then open the fist in what ever time them want. The point would be for them to participate. When they open the box they will see a large balloon. It’s filled with helium and has a bit attached at the end of a string. The more will describe the experience intent and goals. On the back of the cats is a place where people can write a wastage of support for undocumented people. I would hope that messages will be written that are supportive. I was prepared to have people write messages of hate and fear as well. After that the balloon will be let go and will fly away. I hoped to engage people. Have them put on hats themselves and to participate as protestor. I hoped that this would become a chain reaction.

I created a couple of hash tags that were applied to Instagram and to Twitter that are associated with my project. #KINDofaPROTEST, #celebrate the undocumented and # #docuprotest.

Having conversations with the participants after would be a critical component to the experience. What did they think? How is it useful? Could they tell a personal story of their interactions with an undocumented person. I planned that the take away for my participants and protesters alike would be of generating empathy. Fear busting. Creating agency. Educating the public. There is a question that Emilie Baltz posed to me about what else could be in the box. She wondered if an undocumented person could be in it. Not literally, but figuratively. I’m explored the notion of documents. Could there be a visa or green card that has more information on it? Could it have details about how much undocumented people contribute to the city and to the economy? I decided to create a booklet that gave some facts about the undocumented communtiy and some other information that I found vital as a thank you for the participants.

It all begins with the invitation to the party however.

“Protest is broken. Recent years have witnessed the largest protests in human history. Yet these mass mobilizations no longer change society. Now activism is at a crossroads: innovation or irrelevance.” Micha White

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Take Aways If one of the goals of an Experience project is 1. To create meaning and 2. To transform people in some way then Kind of a Protest was a massive success. Throughout the day there was a huge outpouring of kindness and love that was shown to us. The general feeling from the 39 people that participated with us was just as I had hoped: undocumented people are valued in New York City and are a vital part of what makes our communities so special.

The majority of the people that stopped, by chance, had some sort of connection to undocumented people. We had participants from all over the United States and from several different countries. While there was a small amount of resistance from a few passers by the support was palpable and invigorating. As a follow up I am planning on taking Kind of a Protest to the 2016 May Day gathering and plan on scaling up the balloons and doing a larger coordinated release simultaneously. The only thing missing from my protest were hundreds of more participants.

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Chapter Eight

Impacts Political The topic of immigration reform has been in the news more than ever over the past few months and this is been driven clearly through a very negative media narrative primarily being enforced by the Republican Party here in America. With concern to the impact of my thesis politically I think that I am making strong statements towards the strength of our country due to our immigrant population and also the positive contributions they make to our neighborhoods and streets. The ramifications of having no immigrants would be a powerful disruption in our society. The idea that one politician could get elected President of the United States and deport 11 million people is absurd. One of the factors that is not discussed as part of the immigration issue is the logistics and impact of removing 11 million undocumented people. The Republican Party is not acknowledeging the impact of destroying families as well as the negative effect deportation would have on innocent children. Inclusion is one of the great superpowers of America and our ability to celebrate the diversity of the history of our countr. Throughout my life I have always been surrounded by a diverse group of people and this has always inspired me and made me proud to be an American. To consider a community less diverse and that there are people in the United States who want homogenized communities is saddening.

IMPACTS

Social Impacts In my life I have never seen more angst and more hate being spread through the television, radio and the Internet. Most of these narratives are coming from a place of ignorance and lack of understanding in education. I also believe that if people are not willing to make sacrifices in their day-today lives we will never move forward as a society. Which, in part, lead me to the work that I am doing now in grad school. I have witnessed xenophobia and fear in my life and I have been a victim of micro aggressions. It is important for us as designers to use the tools that we have as a leverage to do something good and to create powerful social shifts. Part of the ethos of the department that I’m studying in is that we have given people too many options for too long and we have allowed them to make their own choices for far too long and we are now at a point where we are in such a mess globally that it is time to stop giving people options on choices. and we had designers never going to tell them what they’re going to get. I love this idea because it puts responsibility and agency back into the hands of the designers and actually puts them to task. It forces designers to look at themselves and question, “Am I going to make another cable today? Am I going to make another chair? Am I going to spend my time and energy designing a great new lamp--all of which will make some rich person more comfortable?” I don’t want to design for the 1%. I don’t want to design for the 25%. I want to design for people that need services and systems to operate more appropriate lead to for fill the needs of these users of these people. I could have attended other schools to study design but I chose the Products of Design department because of these ideas.

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With my thesis and the idea of creating services and products, redesigning systems and rethinking platforms for undocumented people, I’m hoping to address this need for a social shift. The subtitle of my thesis, “Removing the Danger From the Stranger,” is not just a cute tagline but one that expresses a critical motive in making the world a better place. 100% unequivocally I know that there is idealism throughout my thesis and I accept that as an honest representation of my values. I believe that if we do not have idealistic values and if our ideas are too rooted in reality. One of my goals in this thesis is to create some kind of narrative that is somewhat fresh that will spark people’s ideas and motivate them to change. Socially there will always be fear in our society there will always be hate in there will always be a lack of trust what I believe that we can make small steps every single day in order to pushback on that. It takes a village, is a saying or an expression that I truly believe in and if we think on a larger scale if we think on a global scale we are all living in one Village in order to have some form of cohesion and to build community and to create harmony to fight all of the chaos we must think globally as a small scale. We cannot continue to think that the things that are happening on the other side of the planet are not affecting us today. I spent time in India in The year 2011 and gained a powerful understanding that what happens in the slums of Mumbai is directly affecting the condominium owners on the upper west side of New York City and anyone who believes that there is not a direct connection is living in a fantasy. The social impacts of my thesis are very far reaching and I am proud to say that I have begun to connect some of the tissue that binds us together as people.

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Economic Impacts Many advocates will argue that the undocumented community is a drain on public and federal resources which in the case of an undocumented person who is not paying their taxes this can be true considering that often times their children are in school. Many economists will tell you that the fact of 11 million undocumented workers on the United States economy is minimal. It is a fact that the wages for unskilled labor is lowered with the amount of undocumented people who are acquiring jobs that require less skills training and often times do not require a high school diploma. Many economists have agreed including Harvard’s George Borjas in saying that the over all bent of the undocumented communities in America is probably somewhere around a 1% net gain as opposed to any law. In my own community in Bushwick Brooklyn I feel like I see the undocumented person’s contributions to the economy every single day. I see it in the delis that I shop that it’s evident when you go to small businesses run by immigrant people for instance restaurants or bodegas and I see undocumented people selling food on the streets out of carts which I believe has a direct effect on many of the members of my community in a positive way. Danny Vinik a staff writer for the new Republic wrote is July 8, 2014, “How much would it cost to deport all of the undocumented immigrants”. “Many undocumented immigrants pay taxes use government services. Most importantly undocumented immigrants contribute to the economy. Labor economist agree that there are no gains to having a larger labor supply. Some groups benefit more than others do and some may even be hurt by the amount of illegal immigrants.

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In 2012 researchers at the Cato Institute estimated that a mass deportation’s policy would reduce economic growth by $250 billion a year. Those cost would not be evenly distributed. Those are the very bottom of the income distribution particularly those without a high school diploma May even higher wages with the absence of illegal immigration. But in total undocumented immigrants benefit the economy”. And even Alan Greenspan the former chair of the Federal Reserve said into thousand nine that “there is little doubt that unauthorized, that is illegal immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy”. Mr. Green’s been went on to state that 1/6 of the labor workforce has been increased from 2000 to 2007 due to undocumented illegal immigration pointing a finger directly at the benefit of having more labor at our disposal. Component that never seems to get talked about economically when Republicans or conservatives talk about wanting to deport the 11,000,000+ undocumented people that we have in our country now is the amount of products and services that they consume on a yearly basis. Billions of dollars would be lost if we deported 11 1/2 million people out of our country and this is a fact that is constantly over look whenever the right wing begins to argue for mass deportation. Let alone the amount of billions of dollars it would cost to physically do the deportations if that would ever happen. Additionally I could imagine what the effects of thousands of families being torn apart could have on the economy. The psychological trauma that a child would experience when their parents were split from their homes or their family members where taken from them could potentially have longer reaching ramifications economically. Imagine a larger group of children growing up without as much adult supervision as is necessary and what that could do to the mental health of that child. And imaging that in larger numbers. It could be a catastrophe. There is so much talk about jobs in America. At the time that I am writing this now President Obama has taken the unemployment rate down to 4.5 and we have seen more growth in this sphere than has happened in over a decade, yet the old narrative that undocumented people or undocumented immigrants are taking out jobs is simply ludicrous.

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We are in the middle of a skills gap in America. There are tens of thousands of long haul trucker positions needed to be filled and yet they are not. This is a highly skilled and physically demanding job that you would hope documented Americans with the interest of making a great living wage would jump at this opportunity. Yet they are not. I wonder of the same people are lining up in Trump rallies to cry about the illegals taking our jobs One fact of the matter is that many of the jobs that u documented people take tend to be the ones that other documented Americans don’t want anyway. Landscaper, busboy, and one of the most coveted positions in any industry the dishwasher. I have personally known people that have barked about losing jobs to immigrants but when given the option to take a low wage/high labor job they have refused. Theres the rub. We demonize this group of mostly hardworking good people and accuse them of something but in actuality their might be a part of the white American conscious that is at odds with him or herself about their own self worth. Economically speaking this is another important notion worth investigating.

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Chapter Nine

Looking Forward There is still so much research to be done, people to meet and users to speak with. I have several upcoming interviews with numerous leaders on immigration and fear. As well as there are many authors on the topics of fear and xenophobia that I hope to speak with. In the coming months there will be many product-service pairings for me to design. I am looking forward to executing them. Many exciting ideas are ruminating as I write this. I know a little and have many more questions to ask. I hope to gain an understanding about why we are still so afraid of each other. When, in history have we been more approachable and more accepting and how can we get back to that place? What is it in a stranger that we find so alarming yet through services like AIR B&B and couchsurfing.com we are allowing these strangers into our homes, to our most intimate of places. Can we bring this warmth and trust into other parts of our lives? How have these become so popular? What will it take for us as a global community to change the way we and, most importantly, our leaders think. The co-creation workshop that I highlight in the Lenses Chapter of this book was a very insightful, educational and delightful process. I am planning on doing at least one or two more of those in the coming weeks. As a tool for discovery and mining of ideas, I am a huge fan of these workshops. Putting fear under a microscope is sure to unearth many surprises, things I wasn’t planning on finding. That part of my thesis might be the most exciting part. I plan on moving into my second semester and final few months of grad school with compassion and empathy as cornerstones of my work.

LOOKING FORWARD

In the hopes of discovering and casting a light on some of the reasons that fear, hate and xenophobia are so pervasive in our society I plan to design interventions that will combat them. I also hope to discover how the mistakes we have made in the past as a fearful society can be avoided in our daily lives. I am reminded of a quote by Liu Xiaobo the Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who said, “Hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy”. [16] As I write this final chapter of this book a new poll taken by The New York Times/CBS reported that Americans are more fearful about the likelihood of another terrorist attack than at any other time since the weeks after September 11th, 2001, a gnawing sense of the dread that has help life Donald J. Trump to a new high among Republican primary voters”.[17] This is the crux of the work I am hoping to unravel. How can we work as a global community to dispel these fears? How can we join our energies and make changes that will uplift our society rather than continue to put up fences and walls? We have seen how the walls can go up but someone or something is destined to dig the tunnel underneath and get to the other side. Human intuition and zeal cannot be stopped, but it can be redirected. And I believe that redirection is one of the great possibilities that we have as members of a larger community. How can we channel all of the fear and all of the hate and all of the rhetoric that we hear and see every day into a positive place. How old are community and society be if we allow hate to continue to dictate our choices? I believe that the answer to that is very simple. We will live in a state of terror in a state of sadness and in the state of self-loathing. Self-loathing because we won’t be able to trust the neighbors that we have living next-door because they don’t look exactly like us or talk exactly like us or buy the same things at the grocery store that whereby. And if we continue to allow fear and Xena phobia dictate much of our choices were also going to lose the cultural diversity in the cultural diverse fabric of our communities.

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LOOKING FORWARD

One of the strongest components of America is our diversity and if we begin to allow fear and hate to influence our day-to-day choices we are going to lose that component. I don’t think that anything that I am saying right now is new to any of my readers. However if we don’t continue to discuss this topic and if we don’t continue to reimagine new narratives we will never progress and move forward. The way that I see it now especially with the 2016 presidential election that we are viewing right now, we are moving backwards and that is potentially detrimental to our progress as a nation and a global community. We should be moving forward and we should be creating space for more people to have the American dream be a component in their lives not as some unattainable ideology. But the way our society in America is developing we are only providing space for those who are “like us” and consequently we are denying the opportunity for “others” to have success. Through the year of work that lead to the completion of this book I have been through many struggles and successes. This area of study is both personal to me and highly sensitive. I have had the honor of working for this community of users, if even only in this small and isolated way. I look forward to continuing this type of work in my career after Products of Design. I have been able to process my own personal and family experiences of xenophobia through the design work that I have learned in grad school. I hope that in the future I will be able to teach what I have learned to others and to spread this powerful medium to the members of my community.

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LOOKING FORWARD

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Selected Bibliography American Immigration Council. “Sanctuary Cities,” Trust Acts, and Community Policing Explained. Oct. 10, 2015. Web. Brown, Stuart. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Avery; Reprint edition. 2010 Chen, David W. Safety Lapses and Deaths Amid a Building Boom in New York. New York Times. Nov. 26, 2015. Web. Department of Homeland Security. U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Southwest Border Unaccompanied Alien Children Statistics FY 2016. October 31, 2015. Web. Fausett, Richard. Immigration Sanctuary Ban Creates Uncertainty in North Carolina. New York Times. Nov. 14, 2015. Web. Gardner, Howard and Davis, Katie. The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. Yale University Press; Reprint edition. 2014 Gaynor, Tim. Midnight on the Line: The Secret Life of the U.S.-Mexico Border. Thomas Dunne Books.2009 Henry, Stuart. Social Deviance. Short Introductions. Polity; 1st Edition. 2009 Korn, Peter. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman. David R Godine. 2015 Levinson, Amanda. Unaccompanied Immigrant Children: A Growing Phenomenon with Few Easy Solutions. Migration Policy Institute. Jan. 24, 2011. Web.

Nisbett, Richard E. The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. Free Press; Reprint edition. 2004 Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books; Revised Edition. 2013 Okada, John. No-No Boy. University of Washington Press. 1978 Ortiz, Ildefonso. One of 50 in Smuggled Group, Salvadoran Child Dies After Crossing the Rio Grande. Breitbart. Aug. 9, 2015. Web. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Penguin Books; Reprint edition. 2012 Quart, Alissa. Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels. The New Press. 2014 Robinson, Greg. By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. Harvard University Press. 2003 Robinson, Greg. After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics. University of California Press. 2012 Uchida,Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. University of Washington Press; New edition. 2015

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CITATIONS

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CITATIONS

Citations 1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/xenophobia. Web. (Last visited November, 10, 2015)

11. Fetell Lee, Ingrid. Interviewed by Adam Fujita. Subject Matter Expert Interview. VIa Skype. November, 24th, 2015

2. http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm. Web. ( Last vsisted November, 17th, 2015)

12. Fausett, Richard. Immigration Sanctuary Ban Creates Uncertainty in North Carolina. New York Times. Nov. 14, 2015. Web. (Last visited November 17th, 2015)

3. Robinson, Greg. By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. Harvard University Press. 2003 4. Department of Homeland Security. U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Southwest Border Unaccompanied Alien Children Statistics FY 2016. October 31, 2015. Web.

13. Baltz, Emilie. Interviewed by Adam Fujita. Subject Matter Expert Interview. VIa Skype. November 21st, 2015 14. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/ immigration/UACSstatement.authcheckdam.pdf Web. (Last visited December 12th, 2015)

5. http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/apr/24/ bangladesh-factories-building-collapse-garment-dhaka-rana-plazabrands-hm-gap-workers-construction Web. (Last visited April, 17th, 2015)

15. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/ immigration/UACSstatement.authcheckdam.pdf Web. (Last visited December 12th, 2015)

6. Nisbett, Richard E. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Farrar, Straus and Giroux . August 18, 2015

16. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/ xiaobo-lecture.html. Web. (Last visited December 9th, 2015)

7. Shabazian, Ani. Interviewed by Adam Fujita. Subject Matter Expert Interview. VIa Skype. October 16th, 2015

17. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/politics/fear-ofterrorism-lifts-donald-trump-in-new-york-times-cbs-poll.html Web. (Last visited December 10th, 2015)

8. Camarena, Rodrigo. Interviewed by Adam Fujita. Subject Matter Expert Interview. Brooklyn New York. October 28th, 2015 9. Revels, Ajay. Interviewed by Adam Fujita. Subject Matter Expert Interview. VIa Skype. November 1st, 2015 10. Levinson, Amanda. Unaccompanied Immigrant Children: A Growing Phenomenon with Few Easy Solutions. Immigration Policy Institute. 2011. Web. (Last visited November 19th, 2015)

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LEXICON

Lexicon Coyote A person who smuggles Latin Americans across the US border, typically for a high fee.

Futuring The field of using a systematic process for thinking about, picturing possible outcomes, and planning for the future.

Haptic Of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and

Maker A person or thing that makes, fabricates or produces something, often with their hands.

Nisei A person born in the US or Canada whose parents were immigrants from Japan. Second Generation.

Sansei A person born in the US or Canada whose grandparents were immigrants from Japan. Third Generation.

Smart objects An object that enhances through technology the interaction with not only people but also with other Smart Objects.

Speculative Theoretical, rather than practical

UAC Unaccompanied Alien Children as defined by the Department of Homeland Security

Xenophobia Fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign to what one knows

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks This list could go on forever. So many people supported me through this semester and my life. I am forever grateful.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Allan Chochinov Gabrielle Kellner Marko Manriquez Andrew Schloss Alisha Wessler Jane Fujita Paloma Fujita Sandie Fujita Jeni Fujita Dennis Fujita Mary Beth Albers Eliz Ayaydin Marie Bachoc Emilie Baltz Ishac Bertran Rodrigo Camarena Doug Chapman Tiffany Chen Carla Diana John Donovan Zack Dunn Xander Dunn Morgan Everett Ceci Fernandez Genevive Gaudet Beatriz Gil Vidih Goel Madeline Guyer Ronald Guyer Steve Hamilton Talisa Hayes Rachel Wiltenberg Hearst Maura Hooper Berk Ilhan Lucy Knops Stepha Krazinsky Ingrid Fetell Lee

Christine Lee Linda Lou Lowry JayCee Migura Sigi Moeslinger Erin Neupher Bryan Plummer Tim Prezan Ajay Revels Antonio Scarlata Ani Shabazian Sinclair Scott Smith Chelsea Spack Rob Walker Elisa Werbler Gina Witlenben Judy Chi Oscar de la Hera Gomez Natsuki Hayashi Wan Jung Hung Isioma Iyamah Panisa Khunprasert Eden Lew Jon Lung Marianna Mezhibovskaya Adem Onalan Tahnee Pantig Souvik Paul Ziyun Qi Roya Ramezani Leila Santiago Chelsea Stewart Belen Tenorio Louise-Anne Van â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Triet Lijia Yang SVA POD Class of 2017

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