Drawing back from the brainstorming session in week 6, I have expressed to my colleagues and tutor that I wanted to focus on creating a service design that actively aims to resolve the issues occurring around Safe Schools Program. The issues include; negative outlook, bias opinion and expression towards the Safe School Program. My initial draft proposal was to create a service design that can impact the community, and especially the ones that are against the program by creating a booklet on “how LGBTIQ feels when…” for families and friends. The aim of this initial draft was to make Safe Schools Program more aware for wider public and to also promote the beneficial impact it has on schools in a personal level.
After I presented this draft proposal the feedback I got from my tutor was that I should remember that our focus age group is 18 to 25. Furthermore my colleagues also commented about my design proposal being too out of our focus age group and maybe consider adopting the issues that I saw from safe schools but applying a design proposal suitable for 18 to 25 age group.
The critical feedbacks that I received from my colleagues were incredible beneficial. They encouraged me not to change the issue but instead strip back, and tweak it in a way to suit our target age group. This was an excellent reminder for me, as I came to realisation that I was going off-track. After the feedback, I decided to cross out safe schools program as being my core problem and instead draw on the issues that I’ve gathered from researching into safe schools program that can be relatable for 18 to 25. The reconsideration of my problem brought me to focus on general publics negative outlook and bias opinion on LGBTIQ in general. The revised draft proposal I came up with is a service design that filters undesirable mentioning towards an LGBTIQ related topic in the Internet.
During my research on safe schools program I found many news articles and posts on social media that were very strongly opinionated and aggressive towards the program. I found these sources incredibly hurtful and bigoted. Therefore I decided that I wanted to make a service design to filter these sources on Internet warning the readers about the harsh content. The service design would be a downloadable add-on available on chrome/safari/fire-fox that can act as option to filter LGBTIQ discrimination on the Internet. The unique selling point of this add-on is that the filtered LGBTIQ discrimination sources would be highlighted or categorised into the core motive, such as religious, cultural or ideology cause.
I hope my service design bring awareness of discrimination towards LGBTIQ online and ultimately educate the public about the essential affiliation all LGBTIQ discrimination is motivated by. I hope my rainbow window extension can be a service to clearly understanding the affiliation behind all negative comment on LGBTIQ. As for LGBTIQ community, I hope my service design can reduce their stress level and pressure they receive from being/going online.
By April Bae
Emergent Practices 
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