Lazy Susan Language Intervention
(2010)
I was raised in a multicultural family. My father is Italian American,
my mother is Filipina. I call myself Filipina Italian American.
Growing up, I was never formally taught my mother’s language, Visayan, although I heard it spoken by my aunts, uncles and grandparents in my childhood home. My older brother learned to speak it, but I could only understand enough to discern the topic of conversation, not the specifics.
In our family gatherings, language was often a barrier. Half or more than half spoke Visayan in addition to English. What usually happened in these family gatherings was Visayan speakers and English speakers had some conversations together, but the groups would split to chat in their native tongues.
When the group as a whole was sitting at the dinner table the conversation would migrate between Visayan and English. People who only spoke English would feel excluded. Visayan speakers wouldn’t necessarily be aware that they were excluding people. They often did this unintentionally. But the dinner table was where we created our fondest memories, and they needed to be shared by everybody. I asked myself, “Can I intervene into the group context in which Visayan is being spoken and native English speakers are excluded?”
I used a ‘lazy susan’ to reach this goal. It’s a round surface and it sits in the middle of the dinner table. You put plates and other items on it and people can rotate it to get what they need instead of asking each other to pass dishes along. It’s a common part of many Filipino households, and it sits in the perfect position to intervene into family gatherings.
I recorded separate conversations with each of my family members where we spoke about the language barrier problem, and they shared their opinions about the problem and how to solve it. I edited the recordings into short clips.
I bought 2 identical lazy susans and installed buttons on the surface of one. The buttons were wired to a hacked keyboard circuit board, and it was wired to my laptop. The laptop ran a simple processing sketch with a “button pressed” interaction. I sawed the other lazy susan into 4 equal pieces. Each piece sat on top of a button.
I hosted a family gathering and we used the hacked lazy susan during dinner. Whenever a plate was put onto one of the 4 quadrants, a button would get pressed and it would play one of the clips.
