When I was 20 years old, I spent a week by myself in Nice, France.
I hadn’t originally planned to be alone–my friends from studying abroad would be joining me shortly, and in the meantime I was staying with another friend, who lived in a small town in the South of France. He showed me around, helping me experience authentic French life (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved lots of baguette, cheese, and smoking). We visited a town built in the Middle Ages, we got stranded after he attempted driving through a far-too-large puddle in his brother’s car, and we hosted parties. Lots and lots of parties.
It was after one of these parties that my friend sexually assaulted me.
Having lost both a friendship and my sense of safety, I boarded the earliest train to Nice, booking a hostel a few blocks away from the beach. As a young woman traveling alone, already on edge from what had happened, I decided to play it safe for the week, my only excursions being walks down to the supermarket or the beach, or occasionally to the shops that lined the streets of the city. Otherwise, I spent most of my time in the hostel, not wanting to risk anything after just being assaulted by someone I had trusted.
Every time I passed through the lobby of the hostel on my way out for my daily walk, I was greeted by the friendly hostel owner. He was an older gentleman with a kind smile, who appeared to truly love hosting young travelers from all over the world. One day, as I sat eating raspberries with bread and cheese in the kitchen of the hostel, he sat across from me and asked me where I came from, and what I studied. I told him about my travels that year–studying in South Korea, visiting Europe with friends I’d made there–and about my life in the US. In turn, he told me about France, and his life living in Nice and Paris (the latter of which he had hated). It was a pleasant conversation, and I was thankful to have had someone to talk to in such a lonely time.
I continued my regular routine–walks to Lidl, lunch in the park, wandering the nearby streets–but part of me felt guilty. I was across the world, in one of the most beloved cities on the planet, and all I was doing was going on walks and keeping to myself? What a waste!
With my time in Nice coming to an end, I decided to give one last attempt at having any experience worth retelling. I went to the hostel owner and asked his recommendations for wine–I had only just started drinking, and who would know better than the French, anyways? I planned to gift him some as a thanks for his hospitality, but the hostel owner threw my plans on their head after offering to walk with me to the corner store to pick some out. He paid for the bottle, too, despite my protests, and we returned to the hostel, bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in hand.
On the walk back, he told me about a nice balcony in one of the open rooms just a few floors above, and asked if I’d like to share a drink up there? I was excited–this was my chance to be spontaneous! I could talk with someone with a life completely different from mine, someone who might have stories to share and advice to give. This would make my time in Nice worth it, I was sure, despite the horrible conditions that brought me here.
I accepted, grabbing what was left of my week’s rations of baguette and cheese, and he brought me to a room with a view stretching all the way to the sea. We sat on the balcony and chatted again, sharing the food under the blue skies of southern France. He told me about his time in the fashion industry in Paris, how he hated it so much that he came to Nice and bought a hostel instead, and about how every winter he closes the hostel and travels to a new place (his favorite being China). He told me that a part of him still misses fashion, and how the dresses I wore (always intricately styled) reminded him of that time. As we talked, the white wine quickly took its effect on me under the hot summer sun, and I didn’t notice anything wrong as he told me I could be an actress, and that he’s buying a lottery ticket and has a feeling that he’ll win–he’ll split the winnings with me, he swears–and that I could be a model (with all of my five feet and two inches in height), does he want me to talk to one of his connections in Paris? I didn’t notice him get closer, or overly familiar, or how his smile which had previously seemed kind now seemed off. It was only when his hands crept up my thighs, greedy eyes searching for more, that I realized something was wrong.
I froze. A part of me still feels guilty for this: for freezing, for not protesting as his hands covered more and more ground. I didn’t even tell my boyfriend at the time about this, because it felt like my fault. If this had happened to me twice in the same week, it must have been something I did, right? I didn’t see the red flags. I made a mistake. It was my fault.
I froze, let him have his way with me, and made a weak excuse a few minutes later to get away, leaving the bread and cheese to melt under the blazing sun.
That was how my week alone in Nice ended–just as it had begun.
—
This quarter, I took a human-centered design course. On the first day of class, our professor sent us out onto campus with one mission: talk to a stranger. People, he explained, are at the core of human-centered design, and one can only design for them if one knows them. Talk to a stranger, learn something new, and report back to class.
I ultimately settled with talking to a school administrator, who I noticed for his bright purple shirt. He was kind, and told me he had a knack for colored shirts (I could respect that, as a fellow lover of bright colors). Our interaction lasted all of two minutes, and I went back to class and reported as asked. And that was it–our first taste of human-centered design.
Design, our professor told us, can be uncomfortable. It can push you outside of your comfort zone, and that’s good, because that leads to growth. Design is about storytelling, and stories come from people, and people should be at the root of everything you create. This is human-centered design.
It’s an aspirational claim, that designers put people at the center of everything they do. I wouldn’t agree with it entirely–it often feels as if corporations and tradition have more influence than they should–but it’s a nice thing to hear about the profession you’ve chosen to dedicate yourself to. In recalling my professor’s lecture about human-centered design, though, and his quest to get us to talk to strangers, I think back to that week in Nice. If a man had asked for wine recommendations from that hostel owner in Nice, would he have been assaulted? Or would he get a nice chat, a new story to tell, and then get to go about his merry way?
There is a fundamental assumption underlying human-centered design that all designers have the same access to stories. Maybe this is true quantitatively, but the kinds of stories I get as a woman will always be different from those of men. Men will get stories about drinks with strangers, new lifelong friendships, perhaps even a free stay at that hostel in Nice. Women, though, will get stories like the one I started this essay with–stories of assault (two in a week if they’re particularly unlucky), rape, and violence, no matter where they go in this world. The stories of women will be restrained, even “boring,” because if they are not, then they will turn out to be stories like mine.
There is an excerpt from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath that describes this tragedy hauntingly well:
“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
I, too, feel this overwhelming urge to listen, to experience these stories, to explore and learn and live life spontaneously, carelessly, even. I have a fascination, an obsession, even, with people. It’s why I study what I do–people are at the center of both cognitive science and design. I want to learn from people, observe them, understand the way they think. But in those times, I am constantly reminded that I am a woman, and spontaneity is a freedom afforded only to men. To men, every stranger presents an opportunity. To women, every stranger is a threat.
This is where my worries lie, as a human-centered designer. My goal should be to listen to people, especially those different from me. But when those people take friendly conversation as an invitation, when those people are twice my weight and have four times my strength, when even that seemingly kind hostel owner in Nice had veiled intentions–well, how on earth can I trust them enough to speak to them? I do not fear awkwardness or social rejection–well, not enough to stop me from talking, at least–but I do fear for my safety, my autonomy, my dignity. I can conduct user testing in controlled settings, but true participant observation–mingling among society, in bars and streets and concerts and hostels–will always be just out of reach, limited to places where a young woman may safely venture (there are not a lot of these places, you will find, and they are not nearly as exciting as the alternatives). And I am angry about this! To think that so much of the world is cut off from women–what an injustice that is, what a horrible world it is that we’ve created.
But what is there for me to do but accept it? What else can I do but freeze?
I am a storyteller. Before I am a designer, a student, an artist, a writer, I am a storyteller. But I will forever mourn the stories that I will never get to hear, the stories I will never get to tell, the stories I will never get to create on the basis of my gender.
Instead, I will tell my story about my week in Nice, and hope that someone out there will listen.
