From body and code <programming in times of acceptance>

Speaker 1 [00:04]

Um, yeah, thank you for being here, um, well introduced by you, yeah, sick, yes, I will talk here basically about, uh, I'm here to talk about accessibility and diversity, which is a theme I'm very dear of, and, uh, but first, um, I want to introduce a little bit of myself so we can kind of get to know each other a little better just before starting right away i come from an artistic field and i used to deal with like this weird interactive arts and places that kind of get together code but it's like a mainly thinking about space and my last job was actually in a museum where i was in charge of the whole space and have to put together a really weird balance between the artist expectations the creator expectations and historical heritage. So that was kind of a hard thing to do. And what am I doing in a Python convention? Well, because I'm kind of changing the space now for a digital space. And what I want to bring here is actually an invitation for us to talk more, because when I come from the space, and I used to be the person in charge of a public space, And I used to deal a lot with that thought of how can I well receive people and people, it's a lot, so many kind of people and welcome them into this space and understand or interact or have fun or what is very common in museums to say, have a meaningful experience from this time you're there. How do you do that with so many diverse people in the world? So I would like to bring these observations into this digital space. And before I even start, that's really an invitation for us to talk. I would love to hear all of your critics, if they are really sincere critics, and your thoughts about it, because you all have your own experiences all around the world. And I think that only connecting them together, we can actually bring a thought into it. And I will start talking about actually the main subject, talking about exclusionary technologies. Is there someone here who haven't heard about this really scandal thing about the soap dispenser that cannot recognize darker skin? You haven't heard? Well, for the ones that haven't heard, pretty gossip, but it was a very big scandal in 2017. employee from facebook office actually went to the restroom and he found a body there and they were kind of chatting and when they went he went like to wash his hand the soap couldn't get out and then his light-skinned friend went and okay he could wash his hand everything was done he was like a dude i cannot wash my hand and he made a video and they were kind of making fun of the video but that was a big scandal and the question which i will go back many times in this talk is like how could this happen how come i cannot wash my hand and now i will switch for a very personal story that i'm sure you don't know about because it's my personal story um how my life totally changed when I broke a foot. And it was really, really a change of life. Everything changed because of one broken foot. And I had already this travel to Uruguay, booked, and I have the broken foot and I didn't want to give up. So I rented, I have the brilliant idea of renting a wheelchair. And with this wheelchair and this weird experience, I had the whole package of, you can imagine of user experience. I went through the airplane, through boat, through train, through taxi, a few public transport, historical heritage, museums, and shopping, and everything you can imagine I experienced, even beach. And it was bad. It was bad. The first thing I felt that I really lost was indeed my dignity, because suddenly you were like underneath everyone's eyes. And you cannot actually talk to a person. People are not looking at you. It's like, oh my God, I lose my dignity. But besides of that, I felt like there was always something missing. Has everyone ever experienced that? Been in a wheelchair for a while? It's weird. You should try to rent that and go around the city. But yes, what I miss more was that everything... was always missing something and I bring the bathroom again because the bathroom was what it struck me more when I could actually find a bathroom to get in with the wheelchair I couldn't actually turn around so it was pretty weird to get up and then have this broken feet and I've I mean I'm a climber I do sports but I didn't have a strength enough to walk around the town and hold myself to pee it was really bad besides of that then i'm like okay i could do whatever i couldn't reach the toilet paper or when i wanted to wash my hand my chair didn't get in the place to wash the hand or i could okay everyone checklist but i couldn't reach the soap or the trash was in the other side of the the place there was no place that was friendly and good enough. There was always missing something. So, could you imagine what it is not being able to use a bathroom? I have another question then. Can you imagine your life without internet? No. So, why should we think about physical spaces different than we're thinking our digital spaces? yeah or at least not its full usability because sometimes we can think oh yeah um i can use that no no there there is a contrast but there's not the full usability and it's the same experience of actually going to the bathroom and cannot wash my hands it's kind of doing a little yeah i have to give a little gift warning if it's really bothering someone please tell me because i love gifts but sometimes bothers people and i try not to stay much on them so i have to say that allows us as reinforcement, because I thought it was a really beautiful phrase, but actually to be denied of basic necessities is to be denied of basic rights. And that's how my experience in the museum, in the actual physical space, come when I'm learning to be a developer. And I'll go back to the question, actually. How could that happen with this scandal of the soap then right and one of the things that comes to my mind is that uh how come that not happen if we're actually living in bubbles and we're always surrounded by people that look like us and we're actually mirroring each other all the time how can we expect to see outside of the this bubble that's what i call and i you we use this weird word that i i couldn't i tried to find another but I really like the one that lack of diversity actually means lack of epistemology that means that when I do not have a different point of views or a different perspective it is impossible to have a really big understanding of something but that's very hard to understand in the real life and I mean we talk a lot and probably in the tech industry we do hear a lot about diversity and inclusion and diversity, but what does that actually mean, that? And even though I'm telling you about that, that we need a lot of people around, it's a loss of epistemology, what does it mean? So I thought about something that may be a little brutal, but kind of works in my head, when we transfer this question into a political meaning, especially here in Berlin, that we're surrounded by an undeniable history of political history. So let's think about when you have a political subject that denied or oppressed another or a different point of view. How do we call it? Fascism. So let's put there two environments, not actually society, which is a micropolitic as well. How would you call a place that we just do not have diversity or opposition to our point of view? that was a little scary for me when i thought about it actually um and just to deepen a little bit more than what i'm trying to do it's like um there's this thing called hashmon effect that actually come from a japanese filmmaker called akira kurosawa that there's a movie called Hashmon. And what it says is that you do not understand something by your own. And that's because we're humans and we do have lots of blind spots and perceptions. And even if we try to be a superhuman, implement a ship, program ourselves to be better, we're still humans and we're still always seeing something that's very partial. We cannot have the full understanding. What we need it's other people together to fulfill this understanding and even if we fulfill they're still going to be missing something because we can talk about scale and probably the bacteria will see very different from the giraffe and the giraffe will understand the elephant differently so that means that this construction it's very important and can be a little more complete or directed towards depending on how many people are thinking together but the thing is that's definitely not easy. Can you imagine all those people around the elephant actually trying to communicate to each other if they speak different languages? Or it's damn hard. It's really hard and complex. So what I did is that I'm very honored to be part of PyLadies Berlin and being inside of a community and being a good listener actually brings me, without even asking, but they just come to me, lots of information and cases that I hear over and over again. And I really will try to be very delicate to talk and gossip about these cases, which I will not even torture tell, nor the real names of the company, nor the people involved. but I thought it is important to say out loud them because they are there and they are frequent going on I didn't hear from I would tell about one specific well several specific persons but I hear similar stories all the time and they're kind of hard to say it so I ask for a little of understanding about them but I will gossip the cases so the first case is three different cases The first case is actually about how do you deal with the difference. And those three different cases I'm talking about is because there are many companies that are forcing this multiculturality, especially in Berlin, that it is a very multicultural city. And it's been forced into places, but they're not prepared to deal with those cases. And so there's this case. And it's basically about implicit racism. and this very light-skinned person probably very used to just see people that look like him see these two people that come from india which is a whole world and so different in its textures flavors tones dialects and he just like a normally come to these people and ask how darker are you from him? I don't know if it makes sense for you but that can be very sensitive and having a very deep racism intrinsic and I'm not here to judge this person and say this person is good or bad because it's very simplistic to say that but actually one thing that he can say is that this person is definitely not used to to see people that are different. um second case um so i learned yesterday that there's this expression in english that called dog it a dog i don't know if no one knows that but i was looking for a word but that's basically means that jungle of dare of competition which is like the basic motto we saw in the movies and been reinforcing the media and the history we hear that business our competition and it's wild and we're trying to do things differently but many people are taught to do that, right? So that happened. That's another case that they have this man and this woman and they're in this new environment. They have the same kind of position and their bosses say, let's try to do things different and why don't you learn to each other and change the experience to each other and like a pair coding together. And they're like, oh yeah, cool, super nice. And then the girl was super excited, grabbed her chair like a seat by the guy and said, yeah, cool, let's do it. And when she got there, the guy looked at her like, I really, I really not understand what you're talking about, but I'm not wasting my time with you. That's the real story. And I didn't hear that just once. And I mean, again, I'm not saying this guy is very evil, but the narrative he learned all his life is that he's wasting his time for learning with someone instead because he has to be the best and be at the top and be the better and like maybe get a promotion for her i mean the line behind of the thought is that of the thing i think we should we're supposed to be thinking about and the third case is the most shocking for me and there's the last one i will talk it's um there's this friend she was uh uh pay attention on the temple verb was a user experience designer in a big company and she deal with wearables wearable are those really cool stuff actually meant to wear so if someone don't know what it's like so like a you can have a soft circuits and you can maybe do a movement and then the light change or something like this and she asked for a sewing machine to do her wearables and this guy that works with her and is very non for be a weird guy just get in the room and say so finally woman and i quote that was the exactly phrase so finally the women are finding their places at this work and that's hard and she took that she didn't take took that as a joke at all and she went to the human resources asking for help because there was another complainants over this person and the answer was that um yeah you know what we talked to him but he was just trying to be friendly and fun and uh yeah and you know what like we're kind of doing through some changes so could you let it go that's what it was and she's not a designer anymore so what's going on and uh going back to the questions like uh what's going on like uh what should we do then we see this world we have these cases that is even it was not my skin and it's hard for me to talk about it so what's going on what kind of world we're living in that our blind spots are kind of overposing and what are we doing as human to to change that but there are the other position too right there's many really cool stuff going on and we always receive all the time people saying i do want to reach more people and different people, but I don't know what to do. Like, they just don't come. I announce, I ask, I have the wish, but it doesn't come. And then I have some questions like, how are you looking to these people? How are you looking to do with this? And very bad slide, too much information. But those are a few topics that just come up in a really short prototyping thing. Like, how are you looking for these people? Are you going to meetups? Like, Berlin is the city of meetup. There's even overlapping meetups with the same subjects. Are you posing the thing you need in specific forums? Like if you don't want Europeans only, are you posting in a specific maybe Colombian forum or some other countries? And that's mainly one of the things. How flexible are the structure and accessible you're proposing? You can talk about accessibility. It's very beautiful in the theory. But like if for this accessibility talk, people in wheelchair would like to come structurally, this room, it's not ready for it. So how are we dealing with the wishes and proposition and how much are we dealing to do to deal with this and change more than anything actually ourselves? Because many times we're like, yeah, we have to accept the other and be diverse. but at the end without actually knowing and again it's not like a people's fault being bad or good but because the narrative we're used to hear and being reinforced all the time are narratives that we cannot actually see what's going on so how much we our own me we're doing that we're actually trying to make people look like us instead of actually being open to accept it what i call the otherness kind of like this word too and yeah that's how I go back for the last time to the question how come that happened with the soap dispenser how come and I have a kind of an idea of that what I love to call a sustainable chain that's how like in my head kind of works as a metaphor to think about that and how I bring the problem like it's not the government it's not the society, the capitalism is the two. But we do not have control over that. But we do have control of how we are doing our thing. Going back to the soap dispenser, I keep wondering how would it be if the buyer that knew that the sensor was cheap and would probably have difficulty in understanding some light would have said something to the programmer. And the programmer would have said, oh, maybe if I improve my code, that could make it better. But maybe they took all of these decisions to the boss and the boss said, no, we have no time or no budget. And then, you see, there's a point that it breaks, but it needs everyone to work together. You need the buyer, the programmer, the boss, and we need to work together to actually make this work. and that's how the complexity makes possible to you and your own hands and yeah the other thing that i think about is that it's very complex there's no manual for it but i keep thinking about the slogan that change a lot into social movements that says nothing about us without us. That means that a user test in five minutes with your subject, it's not enough to compose something that you're not embodying it. We need the diversity because we're doing things and exchanging our knowledge as human. And we need to incorporate that, not only ask multiple checks, for example, like good or bad. And that's how we go back to us and how are we as a developer thinking and understanding and embodying this issue to actually program in times where we should be dealing with acceptance. Thank you.

Speaker 2 [20:53]

so we have plenty time for questions anyone so I have a question could we be more as programmers for example can we like make ourselves more aware of this

Speaker 1 [21:12]

of these issues. Yeah, that's a long and painful path. Like every text, every time I talk to someone is like I've been punching the stomach and say, I never thought about it. I'm just duplicating this thing that I say is bad. It's a hard path to change this narrative. I don't know, I'm with this thing that like I've got to change narratives the way we're understanding singing talk in the world so i think the main thing we have to attack on is on becoming conscious as soon as you are conscious you will not see or scream or replicate or eat the same way so um there's lots tons of theories that are decades in front of actually actions in the world so critical disability theories I highly recommend feminist theory, career theory so many social theory but there's also practical events in November there's ELLI for specifically internet developers and designing for accessibility this meeting this conference is going to happen here in Berlin there's many things online actually and there's even the ways to program like a processing the PJ5 together with New York University They are doing program language for, I think it's for blind. I'm not sure if there's other kinds of disabilities too. So the own programming is made for blind programmers to happen. I mean, there are things and cool things going on.

Speaker 3 [22:55]

Thank you very much for the talk. So this isn't really a question. It's more kind of a comment and a kind of personal experience as well. So I think one thing, two points actually. So one, I think in German, I hear a lot of people who are German natives when they talk about programmers and things at work, for example, go, well, then the programmer, he does this and he does this and he does this. And it's just very frustrating sometimes when I'm like, you can just say they. Or even you could say she.

Speaker 1 [23:22]

you could say she.

Speaker 3 [23:24]

And it's just a tiny little thing and it's kind of, it doesn't make a big difference in speaking, but it does make a big difference for the listener when you feel like...

Speaker 1 [23:33]

actually

Speaker 3 [23:34]

they're talking about me as well oh he's talking about me as well and so i just like to make any german native speaker here maybe aware that saying they as a kind of gender neutral all-inclusive term is perfectly english correct like grammar so you can say that is fine um and the other i just wanted to tell a brief story kind of about what happened to me the other day which was that i my computer wasn't working and i was plugging it in and my female co-worker so i'm i'm a soft i'm a data scientist and she's a trained engineer but we're working in finance and she was making the comment that oh why don't you call your male colleague literally to plug in the computer and i was like anna we've worked together for like two years now why are you saying this and i i think the what i kind of personally learned from this experience was to actually have that conversation with her to not just say to myself like oh no this is really not okay like she shouldn't be saying these things but actually to say to her look we're gonna go for coffee right now i was like shaking but i was like we're gonna go for coffee because this isn't okay like you've known me for two years we've been working together for two years and you're still saying this even if it's a joke even if it's like you think it's funny you were saying this in a room where other people were hearing it when nobody else was protesting about it this isn't okay and it was really interesting to have this conversation with her and to just kind of go okay actually she meant it as a joke and i think hopefully she got now that it's really not funny um so yes i just wanted to share these two points thank you yeah no thanks

Speaker 1 [25:07]

Yeah, no, thank you. And it's actually like, I think we're totally out of time, but just like, yeah, there's actually people think, oh, that's not too much talk about language. Like, well, take the Mexican history. The men usually went to the battle for the revolution and then they fought, but the women were in charge of legislating, writing and being educated. When they went back and revolution was on, what happened is that one of the front women, which I don't remember the name, I'm sorry, said, yeah, cool, I want a part in the parliament and they're like, where do you read in the constitution when one can get in? He said, men. It's like, yeah, but it's an interpretation. And like, no. And then she went to a fight that took 50 years, so she, the one that wrote the constitution would be able to be part of the politic. That's pretty bad. Sorry.

Speaker 2 [25:58]

Thanks for the talk, Paloma. Maybe this is a really aggressive way of fighting this difference that we see, and I am not willing to say which one is more important, but in my own little bubble, I have dealt with some stuff, even since the German language was mentioned, that in my office, every time that someone refers to something or someone from the US, they use the word American. And then, at the beginning, I was like, Hmm, okay, well, the language itself, I think they use American for the people from the U.S. And this is a silly thing, right? I mean, okay, they adopted it. And then it was so often, this was bring up during the lunchtime, the coffee breaks and everything, that I started to make some jokes about it because I am from South America. And then they were like, I don't know, because it's American coffee. And I said, which American coffee? There are so many coffees in the whole, so many countries. And every time that someone's now in the company mention it, automatically they look at me and say, I'm in the U.S. So is this like drop that if you leave it like there, dropping, dropping, people will start at least to modify the muscle memory, at least to fight this. I know that this is just maybe a silly comment, but maybe it's a way of kind of like kind of fighting more aggressive to all these issues that you were describing during your talk. I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 [27:30]

No, totally. We're done? The time?

Speaker 2 [27:32]

Any more questions?

Speaker 1 [27:34]

Well, I would love to keep on talking with you, really, like in the halls and in other meetings, because that's a very dear subject and we need everyone to be involved, otherwise we break the chain.

Speaker 2 [27:47]

So I guess you could approach Paloma after the talk. And thank you.

Speaker 1 [27:51]

Thank you.

Speaker 2 [27:51]

Thank you.