Adjusting images for Africa

Part 1: Sending Visual Tools to Africa

Part 2: Safe Passage to Motherhood 2010

The goal of using visual tools in Kenya was to encourage people to tell stories of their experience with the Home Based Life Saving Skills course, HBLSS they learned the year before. Maggie Alexander is the nurse midwife who trained the group the previous year. Mari Alexander  is a physician assistant who was on the assessment trip two years before. She is a VisualsSpeak customer who has used the tools in her mental health practice and in her work in diversity and inclusion training. The two of them were joined by their teenage sons and a midwifery student for the 2010 trip.

What images should we use?

diversifying paintings of people

The original VisualsSpeak tools are all photographs. While we worked hard to make them diverse, they are still a US designed tool, created for a professional market. We were nervous that rural Kenyans would not be able to relate to them. I’ve been working on new products that incorporate my paintings, and have a deck that we’ve been using in testing those products that we knew worked in the US and Europe.

I’ve also been working on a series of paintings for a storytelling deck. They have broad universal themes, and are the images in my online gallery. I plan to create a storytelling product as well as use these in other new decks.

We didn’t know which to pick, so we decided to send both, but with modifications.

Adding local images

The first deck is a mixture of 24 photographs, 12 illustrations, and 12 abstract paintings. We added 24 photographs Mari and Maggie had from Bware. Most of them were people, but there were also a few of the houses and landscape.

This deck is about the size of playing cards. We made one of those to use with the younger people, but had to enlarge them for working with the adults. We did this because most people do not have reading glasses (other than the gifts the group brings over) so they would have difficulty seeing the details of the images.

Brown is generic not diverse

We felt more confident about the storytelling images for a number of reasons. First, the Kenyans have a storytelling tradition. Second, my style has the flat patterned look of some of the textile work from the region.

When I did the original paintings, I made the people medium brown. As the group looked at them, they felt they were way too light. Especially considering how dark the Kenyans are. They also suggested making them more shades of brown to make the diversity clearer.

I altered many of the people images to be a variety of skin shades. Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, this wasn’t too difficult. I printed out the images and laminated them. We put them in  zipper pouches handmade by a woman in our town, and sent them off with Maggie and Mari.

Other parts of the story:

Part 1: Sending Visual Tools to Africa

Part 3: Stories from Africa

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