Immigration has always been a passion of mine, so when I heard about the DoTank doing a design challenge around immigration to create a pop-up for the Tenement Museum I knew I had to get involved. My team and I were given the following question:
How might we break down barriers and foster connection?
We were given free rein to create the pop-up in whatever manner we best saw fit.
We started with some field research by visiting different immigrant enclaves in NYC, and talking to as many people as possible. During our initial field research we saw that immigrants were relieved to talk to us about their experiences; “yearning to tell”. We also observed the reality of the limitations and restrictions immigrants face and their hopes for the future.
There were somethings we intrigued by like:
- Where negative feelings toward immigrants originate and why they exist given the many contributions made by immigrants to this country.
- How the smallest things (i.e. NY ID) can add value to this group of people
- How despite the fact that “America is the land of immigrants” it lacks immigration history and how that shapes and fuels the arguments for and against immigration
- Different treatment of different immigrant groups
Given the political environment we focused our research on undocumented immigrants but understand the subject from every angle we spoke to people who consider themselves Americans, visited Native American reservations in upstate NY, talk to partners and legal family members of undocumented immigrants. Our biggest insights were how immigrants were living through separation of families, how they felt misunderstood and just wanted to be an integral part of the society and don’t want to be ostracized, or discriminated against. If given the chance they are very willing to share their stories in order to find allies and make an impact on the national conversation happening around immigration. Their everyday lives feel restricted in relation to college education and work opportunities in particular.
We decided to create an exhibit highlighting the stories of different undocumented immigrants and the history of immigration in America. Since then we have been testing our prototypes and iterating them.
