The city of respect

December 2018, somewhere in Athens, Greece.

5 university students, studying Advertisement and Public Relations in Panteion University, have decided to take action regarding their city and its people. We want to help in UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 10, “Reducing Inequalities” .We have created a fictional organization, named activCITY, which aims at raising awareness about the dificulties people in wheelchairs, blind and deaf people face while moving around the city and using public means of transportation. We also want to inform people on how they can help those people, if they need help, without making their life even harder because of the lack of knowledge on the subject.

In order to achieve that, we first had to conduct some interviews, in order to find out what annoys or creates a disrespectful feeling in citizens with some form of disAbility. We interviewed 5 people, who gave us great insight on the matter and helped us see through their eyes and hearts. 2 of them were wheelchairs users, and the other 3 were close relatives to blind or deaf people. It was really impressive that most of them told us the same things, mostly related to respect from citizens. The result was that we were able to create a list of things that one should, or shouldn’t do when it comes to the encounter with people with disAbilities and of course to gather information and feedback on our idea.

So we sat down and thought of different ways to inform citizens and raise awareness. Some of the ideas that we came up with were:

We also cretaed a user experience map on how we imagined the experience of the user-citizen, from not being aware of these issues , towards visiting our website to gather more information, and changing the way he/she acts.

But we still have a long way to go… Betty Tsakarestou Angeliki Symeonidou eddy Michailidis Andromache Efstathiou Amalia St