We live in a world of global connectivity with information at our fingertips but we are still far from reaching towards global acceptance. If territorial boundaries are not given by nature, they are usually drawn by humans and have most often evolved over decades of fighting and conflict. This territoriality at its core draws from the human instinct of reacting to a perceived threat from an unfamiliar object or being. To feel that they belong is to show that we care and respect our cultural differences. Edward T Hall’s cultural iceberg model shows that touching upon communication styles or the sub-conscious parts of the culture can act a bridge between communities creating deep rooted cross-cultural relationships and in turn communicating to peace building. However, the problem is much more wicked than it sounds. One needs to lay the seed to cultural acceptance in our everyday living to be able to respond to sudden encounters in a more inclusive manner. What if our interactions with a device which is so closely intertwined in our everyday lives could mediate our conversations by nudging a behavioral change towards cultural acceptance? In recent times, technology has played an important driver to catalyze community dialogue towards diversity and representation with the release of more than 230 emojis with myriad visual imagery, the list growing every year. While the emojis’ very existence offers an interesting lens to assess how the world is mass perceived, the issue extends beyond the depiction of an individual. For creating more inclusive public spaces, we need to dive deeper into cultural perceptions and make parallel efforts towards building inclusive mediums of interaction. The technological space we have touch pointed upon is gestural interfaces and have proposed the use of cross-cultural greetings as a non-verbal way better understand and integrate diverse cultural body languages into our lifestyle. The reason behind the choice of greetings as an entry point towards inclusive gesture based interactions is due to it being a natural way of building a relationship with or interacting with the human environment. They are also one of the first things that one notices or learns about a community or social group which is different from them. Generally, gestures are incorporated in technologies based on associations with how the deal with everyday objects. The proposed technical interaction is therefore attempted to be made intuitive enough to garner engagement while building a distinctive multi-cultural identity of its own.
-A concept by Shafali Jain and Ananya Agrawal
How does it work? A scenario study:
Believe it or not, that Asian girl in a supermarket in a strange country still struggles alone, stared by the market vendors and fellow customers distrustfully. Imagine one such situation where this girl is having a tough time navigating through the stores by herself, added to the stress of being away from home in an unwelcoming environment. People around her unsee her as they walk past her to the billing counter when this man at a visible distance suddenly bows down. This brings an instant smile to the girl’s weary face as she too bows back to return the greeting. The man sees her performing the gesture, a bit startled, as he was just trying to switch off his AR Glass Headset. He walks to her to know more to ask her why she responded in such a manner. She two talks in his direction glad to see a familiar gesture in an unfamiliar place. This becomes a point of dialogue between the two as the man gets to know that is was a way of greeting in her native country. The man looks at her in a more human light and is instantly able to gauge her plight. He gives her a hand as they share about their cultures more and they get to know each other better. Technology therefore ends up connecting two people who would have preferred to stay in familiar social groups with ‘people like them’ in an ordinary circumstance. The future that we imagine uses an inclusive interaction system built upon gesture-based technologies to nudge towards a more inclusive non-verbal interaction between communities. By the representation of greetings from different cultures, in the technology that is soon to become a part of our everyday lives, we are trying to dive into a deeper understanding of cultures and become more sensitive towards accepting them as our ‘own’. In a future that we imagine, technology has therefore been used as a driver of a social pandemic, the one which accelerates relationship building across diverse backgrounds. Afterall, peace building is about facilitating trust and belongingness, two happy people at a time.
