Observing the Everyday

Greetings all –

I’m a first-year master’s student in the Media Lab, Civic Media. I grew up in Singapore before leaving for Norway at 16. Since, I have lived, studied, and worked in 6 countries across the globe. In several of these places, I worked with NGOs on topics ranging from health and sanitation, to peace and conflict, and community development.

After getting a degree in Anthropology, I returned to Singapore where I worked for a tech policy consultancy. I became unsettled by the discrepancies between tech development and societal transformation; technology was (and is) developing faster than it is bettering communities and I needed to find a way to narrow the gap. I began looking for ways in which the worlds of technology and social change intersected. What I found was either tech giants profiting at the expense of societal ills, or social change organizations struggling to find resources to “digitize” their processes.

For the past year, I have been working as a design ethnographer. Having lived and worked with vulnerable communities, I am (in part) convinced that some of life’s most complex problems require lo-fi (if not, no-fi) solutions. And perhaps it starts with sitting a little more with the problems and observing the everyday; listening to the seemingly mundane to uncover the silences of human relationships and the interplay of technology and humanity.

Nonetheless, I believe that tech has a role to play in building a better world. My hope is that our conversations in class will pierce into new portals of reimagining the old; to uncover tools to assess technology’s role in meaningfully addressing any problem.

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