BENGALURU: Often in cases of harassment, physical and sexual abuse of women in public spaces, it has been found that many do not go directly to police stations to register complaints, for fear of humiliation. Others are just weary and not confident that their complaints would be followed up and acted upon.
In an effort to try and reclaim public spaces for women, a team from the International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) has built a prototype of a device where women can register complaints informally. The idea is to install the device in public spaces around the city. Yashvanth Kondi is one of the five core members of the IIIT-B team that conceptualized, researched and designed the project. He says, “The device will function a bit like an ATM kiosk and will register informal reports which will then be aggregated to get an idea of what areas are unsafe.” The team consisted of students fro IIIT-B MTech students, two MediaLAB Amsterdam students, and a mentor at Fields of View, a non-profit working in tech policy research.
The device’s use is meant for authorities such as the BMTC, who have the authority and the means to make public transportation more friendly to women commuters. “The concept, of course, is to generally provide an anonymous feedback mechanism for organizations with institutional linkages which can take action,” adds Yasvanth.
The device is called ‘Convers[t]ation’ and the initiative is named “NextWave” as explained by Yashvanth, “It is called, Next wave as in to seed the “next wave” of progress in women’s rights.” He however, makes it clear that the device is not a substitute for direct police complaints. “Victims who are interested in taking action for their individual cases should report directly to the police. Our device is meant to collect anonymous reports from women who are interested in reclaiming public spaces, of which we believe there are plenty,” he says.
One of the major problems for the team was figuring out where to keep the device, as the components are not too cheap and are vulnerable to vandalism and theft. “We thought of transport hubs (eg. Majestic) as they already have some security presence,” he says. For the prototype to be installed, the team also did research as to what kind of device would be most suitable for the public. “Before we decided on the specifics of our device we wanted to see how the public interacted with these kinds of kiosks, and what designs would be more robust,” says Yashvanth. The team installed panels.
The fieldwork for designing the concept of the device largely consisted of interviewing women’s rights activists. “Later once we were sure that we were going to build this kind of device, we also interviewed the TEM team at Microsoft Research, and observed how panels were used in public spaces at the Vishweshwariah Science & Technology museum,” says Yashvanth. While the team has not approached any government authorities yet, Madhav Rao, Asst. professor, IIIT-B, the mentor for the team says, “We are open to collaborating with the government and other agencies,” he adds.