I do realize the ease of writing about one’s values as opposed to being true to them in action. It is a constant struggle towards our ideal Self.

The value of Universality encompasses within itself a lot of other values. Work that comes out of us when we recognize the inherent universality within all of us imbibes lot of traits like – absence of any form of discrimination (gender, race, status, is non-hierarchical …); is open – does not recognize authorship of any sort; is transparent and truthful. And within such an environment or artifact all that is left is being playful.

The Unabused Childhood Hackathon
The Unabused Childhood Hackathon aims at generating solutions that address the most urgent issue of childhood abuse and rape. It invites people from a variety of backgrounds – people with experience in skin engineering research, sensors; designers; related medical experts; policy makers; developers and builders; parents and participants with personal stories and experiences with the issue.

Most cases of child abuse and rape go unreported, unknown even to the parents and guardians of the child. Most children are left clueless and helpless at making sense of the joltingly new and horrendous ordeal. Can we utilize the recent developments in Skin Engineering to address this issue? Given the sensitivity of the issue we need people from various backgrounds to come together to engage in co-developing possible solutions.

The three social issues that I am looking at through Lessig’s levers of change are:
Child Abuse & Rape ; Unjust Labels (Black; White; People of Color); Feeling safe and comfortable on the street

Issue 1: Child Abuse & Rape
During my recent trip to India, I came across several mentions in the media about cases of child abuse and rape. Having been through an incidence of abuse myself at the age of 11, I know that most of these cases go unheard as much as above 99%. I had read that the Government of India operates a helpline for addressing this. It is no surprise that one-third of calls received on this helpline go wordless, given how clueless a child is about what to even make out of this jolting ordeal. In most of these incidents, the culprits are someone in the family or someone known to the child. There is nothing more urgent and pressing than putting an end to this issue which might be happening somewhere around the world this very hour!

Architecture/Code
“Artificial Skin Engineering!”
In my opinion Code is the most critical lever here, as the biggest issue is of most cases going unreported and even being unknown to the close family of the child.

Utilizing the recent developments in the field of Artificial Skin Engineering (especially the capability of high resolution pressure sensing), one can look at developing artificial electronic skin implantable within the reproductive organ at a young age. And since children are likely to visit a doctor frequently, the doctor can keep a tab on noticing any unwanted activity through the electronic skin, and inform/alert the parents/guardians.

Obviously, a lot of thought and research has to be put to check the viability of this solution as there are multiple glaring issues (eg: growing age) that need to be solved to make this possible.

Norms
Finding appropriate ways to educate children and adults on these issues, to alleviate hurdles that restrict open discussion around them.

Law
Stringent laws are already in place in most countries in this regard, but they are not able to help as the issues occur on a continuum with varying degrees of abuse, and thus most cases go unreported.
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Issue 2: We are all People of Color (#WAAPOC)
The labels “White” and “Black” were created in 1779, which was a very different society where one group of people dominated another. In my understanding, in coming up with these labels the lighter skin color was taken 70-80 shades up and labelled as “White” and the darker skin shade was taken 70-80 shades towards the color “Black”. Also I think White and Black are very loaded terms, with all sorts of other meanings associated with them historically in different cultures and religions.

Even as of today, the very common way of categorizing people into “White” and “People of Color” does not seem right on some level. Should we relook at these labels and give everyone a chance to collectively come up with them. Would our future generations benefit by having other more playful and creative labels (toffee color, almond color …..) .

What if we let colors be just colors and not an identity for a person …

Architecture/Code
I am working on creating a simple app (#WAAPOC) that aims to defamiliarize us with these labels that we have grown with. The user simply clicks or uploads a picture of themselves and the app sees how far their skin shade (in RGB) is from the colors White (255,255,255) and Black (0,0,0). You can then also share the app with your friends and see the average skin shade of your close network, so you can see if you hang out with people who are very similar to you based on their skin color.

Finally, the app gives the users a chance to suggest labels that they would like to see in daily use. Next the app shows users a word cloud of suggestions made by others.

Norms
Using other media like video, games that can help us get defamiliarized with existing labels and rethink about their relevance and revise them if needed.
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Issue 3: Feeling comfortable on the street (women)
There is big difference between the experience of a man vs a woman in walking on the streets or using public transport. It would become very apparent if we could measure the number of eye gazes that a woman encounters vs a man when going about their lives out of their homes. Obviously a lot of this attention is discomforting to say the least. And again, this is something which happens all the time and because it is so pervasive, the only option is to learn to live with it or somehow be okay with it!

Architecture/Code
WeSafe: An app that lets users to mark a location on the map where they felt uncomfortable due to presence of another in their surrounding.

Norms
Creating norms through education and awareness about being respectful to others.

Law
Current code and architectures make the lever of law weak. With better computer vision systems this can be changed but those systems will have implications of their own if not thoughtfully implemented.

– What’s the full scope of the problem?

During my undergrad, I had created a one of its kind Indian language word building game ‘AKSHARIT’. Unlike English which has a 26 letter set, Hindi and most other Indian languages have ~40 consonants and ~15 vowels (used like diacritic marks in French), leading to ~600 possible letters. Thus, if one were to make an exact replica of the Scrabble boardgame for Indian languages, one would need around 4000 tiles and the playing board would be bigger than a double bed. I overcame this issue by an innovative tile design, that used transparent tiles for the diacritic marks, these could be placed atop the opaque consonant tiles to form all the different letter combinations. Using these the game could be played using only 130 tiles versus 4000 earlier.

Using these tiles as building blocks, a bevy of language learning games could now be created for younger learners, thus making the traditionally dry subject of learning the Hindi language a much more fun and engaging experience for children. We created both physical and digital versions of our language learning games.

– Who’s affected?

Children ages 4-10 year olds, especially the ones studying in more traditional government schools located in tier-2 and tier 3 cities of India, where still much of the instruction is limited to students attending lectures passively and relying just on textbooks to learn the subject matter.

– Who’s best positioned to address the problem?

Most attempts made at creating language learning fun are either made by teachers themselves or by professional game and app developers. Quite often games and activities created by language teachers are not really as fun and engaging, whereas games made by game and app developers although more fun but often lack measurable learning outcomes. To solve this issue, we had a team of three people with one game designer, a language teacher and an educator turned app developer.

– What are predictable consequences of the proposed solution?

The game was initially piloted in over 1000 schools. Subsequently pre and post tests conducted showed promising results in improving language learning outcomes for young learners. Currently the game is being used in 3000 schools. Each game box had a pre-stamped post card in it, using which teachers could share there feedback about the game back to us. We received 750 such postcards back, with promising feedback and also qualitative anecdotes from teachers regarding the positive effect of the game in their classrooms.