Everyone has the right to be heard no matter what language they want to speak. This lead me to ask the question: Where do people feel comfortable or uncomfortable speaking the language they express themselves in the best.
America (specifically New York City) is a multilingual society. Yet many interactions that take place in a public space are dominated by English because English provides access to jobs, opportunities, and many forms of assistance. Unequal attention to native English speakers vs. non-native English in America is a problem that persists in many public spaces. To protest monolingual systems, attention needs to be called to spaces in which multilingual people feel uncomfortable speaking a language other than English.

To answer the question, “Where do you feel safe speaking out loud?” I needed to ask people who live in different areas of New York City where and why they felt comfortable speaking a non-English language. A cultural probe is an open-ended design research tool that allows one to draw insights into someone else’s life, feelings, and interactions. The probe was used to ask people to tell me about themselves, their relationship with their different languages and where they use them. I had people go to their favorite cafes, restaurants, and general locations they frequented in New York in an effort to gain insights into what sorts of places and environments were more conducive to personalized language use.

In my kits, I included many activities that ranged from asking someone where they like to hang out in New York to telling me a joke. For each language used, I had a bilingual friend to help me translate. In addition, I have studied Spanish and Mandarin in the past, giving me some comprehension capabilities in those languages. A total of 8 kits were distributed and completed. Through this kit designing and making, I learned a lot about translation and typesetting languages that use characters instead of an alphabet. It was an interesting experience dealing with two languages that are fundamentally different and how it forced me to change the designs of the kit very subtly.

Even after writing a research paper and looking at the numbers and percentages, I felt it was necessary to listen to the people themselves as humans with individual experiences, feelings, and stories. The results that I got back from the cultural probe showed that people felt unsafe speaking their non-English language in public. After more continued research, I found that signage was a way people were influenced to speak a certain language. Signage acts as a way of visually owning a space. If an area has only English signs, a person is visually encouraged to only speak English.

I looked into museums as one possible place of intervening with signage. They are hubs of historical and cultural learning. Why don’t these places display their art with captions that are in the language they come from? Not all of these artists spoke English 24/7, and the people coming to this museum should be able to connect with the art from their own culture via their language. The Metropolitan Museum of Art especially attracts the largest number of visitors that speak a non-English language as their main language, so I made my mock-ups (considering coronavirus) as if they were to be in the Met.

I developed a system where people can protest this language inequality in a public space by bringing their own sign in their language with a story from their culture relating to an artwork or artifact to the museum. Story and narratives are at the core of my project, so I wanted people to be able to add this into a public space that is largely dominated by an institutionalized researched history.

These stories and narratives are valuable as research and meaningful things that deserve to be heard in any language they choose to be spoken in.