Our entire team comes from an immigrant family background coming from different languages, cultures, and generations. Communicating between immigrant families is difficult. For our user research, we spoke to Emily and Jason, two college students with immigrant parents. Emily says, “My mom wouldn’t know terms like mass incarceration in Vietnamese” which demonstrates the gap in understanding and communication between the parent and child for important societal issues. However, Emily and Jason both care about important social issues such as Black Lives Matter and want to speak to their loved ones about this issue. Their proficiencies in the language spoken at home also hinders their ability to communicate effectively with their parents. Emily states that, “I talk to my mom in Vietnamese because she would understand better but if questions were in Vietnamese, I would feel like I had a lesser ability to respond than if the question were in English.”
Using documentaries about global issues, we are creating an interactive watch and learn experience for immigrant families to learn and talk about important social issues. We picked this solution because media is able to powerfully convey information about societal issues. It is easier to facilitate conversation because they are guided by the information from the film which they both watched. We chose Youtube because it has global content and is a free, accessible platform. While watching, we display questions for viewers and we have a guided conversation tool afterwards with the questions. We help facilitate the conversation for users struggling with communicating in different languages using a vocabulary cheat sheet for commonly used terms in both languages and a built-in translation tool. Notice both English and Spanish are displayed so both language speakers can actively participate as well as learn each other’s languages for better communication in the future.
Built With
- figma
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