In thinking about last week’s class and learning more about the assignment I was shocked to find out that the Langone Hospital has no practices or training in place for LGBTQ+ inclusivity. In my view one of the big reasons that is the case is people’s inability to relate in any way to the kinds of cognitive processes people with non-traditional gender and sex norms experience. For this reason in reviewing materials for this week, professor Piantella’s lecture, especially the part on participatory design, struck me as highly relevant for the current project.

In personal experience I had very little interaction with people who undergo transitions and openly discuss their non traditional gender identities. The chance to connect with Max during the past lecture was very inspiring and shone light on the kinds of conversations that need to happen on a broader scale in order raise awareness of how representatives of LGBTQ+ communities interact with the world through the lens of their experiences.

I also had a chance to connect with a friend of mine who has a non-traditional gender identity in the hope of learning more about their experience, but found that I couldn’t quite formulate my questions. It was difficult to drive the conversation towards gender identity especially in the context of healthcare being a very personal subject. They didn’t seem too eager to chat about it and I didn’t want to seem invasive, for that reason I thought digital questionnaires and interviews could be a more tactical approach moving forward in the preliminary research.

Side note: it was suggested in Piantella’s lecture not to rely on surveys too much and try to exclude personal information such as sex & gender. It would be difficult to avoid that since our subject revolves around it but I definitely keep this in mind during the survey design, to focus more on the patient experience and minimize gender-related information to only essential.

I also had a chance to research the resources provided in the project description. My group created a google doc for preliminary research and connected over zoom to discuss our thoughts. There was a lot of helpful information, but the data provided in the research was not quite relevant to the population we will be targeting in the project. For that reason we decided to focus on the local community and reached out to the LGBTQ Center at NYU in the hope of being able to distribute an anonymous survey among its members. We also began designing a questionnaire using google forms and created a mural for some highlights of the research. It’s been great to collaborate with others, especially because the subject matter is broad and having different perspectives will help moving forward.

Currently we require more research to understand the biggest pain points in the local community, but I’m starting to ask questions about the kinds of deliverables that we might have.

• Should it be digital or physical?
• Educational or experience enhancing or both?
• Should we focus on a particular subgroup of the target population?

Hopefully some answers will emerge after we share the survey.

Two concepts from lectures I found useful:

Systems thinking: exploring relationships, boundaries and perspectives in a complex system

Critical Design: challenge narrow assumptions!