Body Positivity — A call for a Social Movement
Tags: Human Centered Design, Social Innovation, Body Positive, Design Innovation, Service Design

By Design Innovation: How Might We Encourage Body Positivity at an Early Age?

Service Design Reflections — Building up the underlying research methodology, mapping the problem, co-creating a shift in the mindset in a socially viable environment

A 2-week group assignment as part of M.Des in Design Innovation and Service Design course at Glasgow School of Art, unfolded the ordeal behind a social issue that is deep rooted in different cultures across the globe. The impact of how body image is tackled at the young age tends to affect us throughout our lives.

The genesis of this project was initiated with a reflexive investigation into our life’s events, moments, and encounters with the world around, encompassing our social, cultural and political associations. During this auto ethnography process, we used journey mapping techniques and identified the critical issues that rose out of each one’s life journeys. The glimpses of opportunities emerged during our group discussions, which led us to delve into various interconnected issues such as bullying at the young age at schools or colleges or even as early as the pre-school child care. The demoralizing role of body image and body shaming was also a pressing revelation through our self-observation.

The Research which Opened Many Doors:

Starting with the issue of ‘body shaming’ and reading through the online resources, news articles and personal blogs we did lose our way while formulating the strategy for enquiry. Reflecting upon and tracing back our research process, I was able to better formulate a structure that we had followed.

The epistemological positioning of our research was deep rooted into ‘Constructionism’ where we strived to build upon the experiences of our individual lives, constructing the meaning around our lived experiences (our team belonged to different parts of the world –China & India) and uncovering the perceptions of our participants who had been subjected to body shaming either throughout their lives, or at specific points in their journey.

The theoretical perspective of our research involved the basis of ‘Symbolic Interactionism’, to recognize how people establish meanings and interpret situations based on the past notions of body image. We wanted to enquire how body shaming is associated with low self-esteem and investigate how people deal with it on a daily basis.

The obvious research methodology that came up was ethnographic enquiry by interacting with our participants and hearing about their lived experiences. We went into the participant interviews with a well thought of questionnaire which soon gave way to an unstructured and non-directive form of questioning.

Drawing insights from each conversation and then reorganizing them through affinity mapping brought up a plate full of opportunities all directing us to address this social problem through a social solution.

Hurdles: The team was located in different cities and conducted the entire research through online mediums. The interview of participants was through zoom and over phone calls. We might have missed few crucial insights which we might have retrieved through face-to-face interviews in an ideal scenario. Nevertheless, we embraced this as part of learning and adapting in the current scheme of things.

Define | Sketch | Decide — ‘Body Positivity as a Social Movement’

Normalizing how people perceive appearances and advocating the acceptance of all body types, it was imperative that we veer the mindset from body shaming to body positivity. This alone was not solving our intentions of creating a society where the inherent values and traits of a person presides over appearances. With these intentions, we started co-creating a social movement WITH the teenagers and FOR the teenagers, empowering them to create a long lasting impact through their collective actions.

Unattended Wishlist: An unfulfilled step during the project was designing engagement tools for a participatory design workshop with the teenagers and interaction with the organizations working for the youth. An observation study of how these youth organization work with teenagers would have been an icing over the cake.

Instigating a social change require addressing the issue at various touch points. Our movement #lovewhoyouare was directed towards teenagers as stakeholders and targeted at the school level interactions. As facilitators of this event, our goal was the PLAN, EXECUTE & CREATE AWARENESS.

PLAN: #lovewhoyouare will contact the neighboring schools, associate with teenage volunteers to plan the activities, decide the date & location and promote the event

EXECUTE: A full day workshop will be planned for the students of the school hosting the event. There will be ‘Engaging’, ‘Connecting and ‘Collaborating’ exercises, backed up by informative lectures and brochures as takeaways.

CREATE AWARENESS: Word of mouth (we expect teenagers to walk out of these workshops carrying a positive personal image and embracing the new mindset of looking within for the core values of each person); online awareness through social media and an informative website.