Embrace: the journey to empathy and compassion
Date
2024
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Abstract
The world right now faces a continual gap in opportunities and access to benefits between different social groups. Oppression and Marginalization are not just driven by income, but also by gender, ethnicity and culture, race, sexual orientation, class, and religion. There is a need to accept these social boundaries and unleash the humanity's potential to thrive with its boundless creativity, mutual respect and provide people with meaning. Design has the power to convert this noble thought into a movement that creates change, which is the aim for this campaign, "Embrace." I want to use design to reach masses and create a visual language to be adopted at grassroot level, allowing people to build a stable and accepting society. Throughout my graduate studies, I have created awareness about social issues including breastfeeding taboo and maternity leave. This awareness campaign is about a variety of social concerns which will nudge our thoughts towards becoming a more balanced society. Specifically, I have created "Embrace" symbols depicting and creating consciousness about the principles of gender balance, income, racial, ethno-diasporic equality, and family bonding. These symbols, at their core, represent the balance between our intelligence and emotional quotient. By creating a visual communication method through symbols, I want to create an awareness campaign using which, I would like to introduce a path for people to not only be aware but be proud of associating with this campaign. Through this campaign, I also hope to encourage corporations to transform their practices and embrace people of all types in their policies and use my symbols as a badge of acceptance of their socio-economic performance. I want to promote these symbols and this campaign as a representation of human-centric responsibility among corporations, thus, helping create a more equitable society. In future, I would want to see this campaign added as an 18th goal among UN's sustainability and development goals where embracing emotional intelligence will bind together and enable the achievement of all the other 17 goals.