Upbraid is a piece of Speculative and Critical Design that creates space for women’s voices in the workplace by adjusting the verbally dominating behavior of male colleagues.
Speculative Design | Discursive Design
Upbraid was awarded the Core 77 Student Runner Up in Speculative Design 2020. Watch the jury panel discussion here.
Challenge:
Women face significant barriers to being heard and having voice in the workplace that greatly impacts their overall career success and money earning potential. Behaviors such as interrupting, talking over female colleagues, mansplaining and “hepeat” plague women in the office on the daily and reinforce the longstanding cultural biases around women’s competency and intelligence while also reinforcing men’s inherent right to speak and lead in this environment. These seemingly mundane verbal practices are a mechanism gender based silencing and function as a way for men to assert power over women.
Goal:
Upbraid — which means to criticize severely or scold — is one project in a larger suite of work designed as part of a thesis exploration into gender, voice and power. It is a speculative and critical design that aims to provoke conversations around the "mundane" or daily ways that women experience verbal forms misogyny and sexism in the workplace. The goal of the piece was to spark conversations around gender power dynamics and in regards to voice and to prompt discussion about what the consequence of silencing women, and the value of women’s voice.
How it Works
Upbraid is intended as a tool that businesses implement at the corporate level and integrate into employee onboarding processes and performance reviews. Individuals set up a profile with a voice recognition sample and avatar that are linked to their corporate employee ID, email and phone number. Upbraid is used on the employee’s smartphone since it is a ubiquitous and easy tool in most corporate workplaces. The app is used during meetings and team work sessions and creates a digital meeting space by visually placing the avatars of each team member into one screen environment.
Using voice recognition, the app tracks the talk time of different employees and visualizes the state of a conversation in real time by scaling up or shrinking the size of the avatars based on their talk time. If a male team member begins to dominate the talk time, his avatar will grow in size and become mean and villainous, visibly squashing the avatars of the others into the corners of the screen. If the behavior persists, Upbraid highlights the offender on the screen in red and sends warning “nudges” via text message reminding him to let others speak.
At the end of each session, Upbraid sends the team and managers a recap including each member’s talk time, number of interruptions and decibel level. Upbraid also sends each member a letter grade for their participation in the session; offering critical feedback and suggestions for improvement going forward. If a male team member does not improve over time and chooses to ignore Upbraid’s corrective suggestions, the platform begins withdrawing money from his paycheck and redistributes the funds to female teammates he silenced. This financial consequence is employed as a means of adding motivation and gravity to the situation.
With Upbraid, the responsibility of corrective action and the consequences for failing to change are placed on men; a direct reversal of the current dynamics in office environments where women suffer the consequences of not acting more like their male colleagues.
"It is understood that men in leadership are often 'aggressive' or the loudest person in the room. This translates to being the most passionate voice when it's really just that, physically, your voice is louder than mine."
— COO of a leading design strategy company
Research | Process
As part of my thesis research, I interviewed a variety of subject matter experts to gain insight into the state of gender, voice and power today. During these interviews, women routinely mentioned the workplace as a space where gender power dynamics were most present and fraught in their lives. This prompted me to dig deeper into the dynamic forces at play regarding voice and gender in the workplace.
Physically speaking, women can struggle to be heard in the workplace because of the difference in their voices when compared to men. Generally, women speak at a higher pitch than men, which means that they do not carry as far and can be harder to hear. Women also tend to have larger gaps at the back of their vocal cords, which allows for more air to pass through. This gives women's voices more of a "breathy" quality, which can also make it harder to hear.
Culturally and socially speaking, women face gender bias in the workplace which contributes to people not listening, or “hearing” them. These cognitive biases challenge women’s intelligence, skills and overall competency in performing their jobs. This is often in combination with cultural attitude of male entitlement, where men feel the right to speak and be heard. When confronting these issues, women are told to “push back,” “speak louder,” or “be more assertive,” all of which place value on a masculine coded way of speaking that requires women to change our behavior and adapt to a hostile environment.
From this primary and secondary research saw an opportunity to design a service that would make visible the verbal challenges that women in the workplace to address the fact that the effort and burden of being heard shouldn’t fall solely on women.
