Team U.P (Uniting People): The Whole story…

Hi everyone! We’re team U.P (Uniting People) and we wanted to share our story with you. First of all we’d like to introduce you to our team which is consisted of two individuals : Stelios Stiakakhs and Veronika Samu. During this whole semester in the class of social innovation and corporate resposibility we were encouraged to pick one or two of the 17 SDGs (Social Development Goals) that United Nations have put out, aiming to a more suastainable society till the year 2030.

At first we though to focus on SDG no.14 (Life below water) but as a couple of the presentations in the class went on, we found out that a lot of people would do the same topic so we got ourselves to search for a different topic that spoke to us the same way or even more. And we found it ! We ended up on choosing the SDG no.10 ( Reduced inequalities).

We selected this particular SDG because our first thought was “ If we don’t solve the quarrels between us first, then we would not be able to move on to other subjects such us environmental issues which need a cooperative work”.

After searching a bit more about “our” SDG on the official webpage of the United Nations, we discovered that there was actually no goal set for 2030 that was directed solely on the topic of the rights of the LGBTQIA+ people around the world. So, with one member of the group belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community and the other very passionate about an assingment aimed on these topics, we decided unanimously to focus on the interaction between the two communities: the LGBTQIA+ and the nonLGBTQIA+.

We believed that, although LGBTQIA+ related issues have been investigated and processed before and important steps have been taken towards a more accepting and tolerating future, the fight between the two communities is still strong. And we also believed that this is mostly due to the fact that the two communities seem to not exactly know how to communicate with each other.So we decided that this would be the purpose of our social innovation project. Making people interact, know, and understand each other better is crucial to the communication part because only then it is actually productive.

So we asked ourselves “ What can we do to bring different people together, to make them interact properly and share their views and opinions with an accepting and respectful tone?”. To our minds, productive communication was everything to the goal that we wanted to achieve which was to build bridges of communication between the two communities…

So as a first step we did a lot of brain storming and we also made a chart board of what we see as potential sources of the communication problem between the two communities.

This chart board helped us to do the next step which was to condact interviews to some random individuals (LGBTQIA+ and not) so as to come in better touch with our target groups which basically was every living beeing who has the ability to start and continue a conversation :P… The Board actually helped us to form the questions for the interviews. The question were the following

1. How do you identify? Have you ever questioned it? (did you feel the need to?) What’s your opinion about the individuals that do Question it? Do you have regular interaction or conversation with individuals who identify different than you? Have you ever been encountered by such individuals? If so did you instantly figured it out and what was your reaction after you found out?
2. Do you believe that in 2018 there are still problems with the communication between the LGBTQIA+ and the nonLGBTQIA+ community? (If yes) Where do you think that the problem is located in the modern society (2000-today)? Do you believe that there have been improvements towards these kinds of issues? (If no) Would you elaborate why you think there is no problem, when people around you are protesting? What’s your opinion on pride and the LGBTQIA+ community fight for equal rights? Would you ever go to such an event even for educational resons?
3. Do you inform yourself about issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity? (If yes) How often? From where do you get your info? Are you satisfied with your knowledge? (If no) Why do you think that you are not informing yourself? Do you consider it necessary? Would you attempt to inform yourself further?
4. Do you discuss topics of sexual orientation and gender identity with your family? (If yes) How often? What is the general topics that are being discussed? (If no) Do you think that there is a reason that ther’s no discussion? Do you ever have started such a talk?
5. Which emotions do you have when you are asked to talk about LGBTQIA+ related topics?
6. Are you familiar with the term “ Queer culture/Queer aesthetics”? (If yes) How it translates through your eyes and ears? (If no) Would you make an attempt to look it up?

The answers from these questions mainly showed us that the majority of the interviewed individuals were not interested or afraid to “come out” and talk publicly about such issues but may attemp such talk if it was more discreet and subtle.

These outings gave us the idea of creating a prototype tool of communication, at first without face to face interaction, to see where this was goinng to go. We concluded to an Instagram page called Uniting People (obviously taken by our team name for the project) because we believe that social media was, is and always will be a powerful way to spread any type of message you may want to spread.

We kept it very informal to give our followers the sense of a natural interaction and communication. Our concept was to promote communication and interaction through humour by posting LGBTQIA+ related memes or other material produced by us or by our followers (texts, artwork, poems, photos etc.) and calling them to start conversations in the comment section below every post…

We gained some followers and we also recieved messages from some of them but they were completely non related with our line of work so we politely responed to them.

The page was not going well so we got to question what we can do to improve it and first we thought to work on the promotion of the page to further media.

Also Veronika Samu took the liberty of making the User’s expirience map from the toolkit we got from the openideo as instructed by our professor Betty Tsakarestou.

What we took out from this whole expirience of human-centered desing thinking is that when you trying to work with the human factor in desing thinking you have to expect the unexpectable because humans are very unpredictable and unique. Also you have to constantly adapt and redesing to suit your target groups needs and wishes. You may encounter lots of difficulties and creative dead ends but you need to keep thinking and risking. Also we leaned that interacting with people face to face is way more difficult than we had expected it to be.

As for our next steps we want to try and push people to come together and interact on a more personal and face to face way. Maybe this would be better. Maybe not. We certainly want to find out…

Thank you for spending some time to read our story and we hope we have become some sort of inspiration to you too :D

Team U.P : Stelios Stiakakhs, Veronika Samu

Sources: https://www.colouryouth.gr/projects/
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/