Wired And Rooted: The Technology Transforming Access to Justice

In this episode of Fair Enough, we’re exploring the transformative power of technology in promoting access to justice. Hosts Victoria and Lauren are joined by two inspiring guests: Professor Cathy Holloway, a leader in interaction design and innovation, and Elly Savatia, a self-proclaimed tech optimist and social entrepreneur from Nairobi.  

 

This episode considers how technology can bridge communication gaps for marginalised communities, particularly focusing on Elly’s groundbreaking work with Signverse, an AI-driven platform for real-time sign language translation.  

 

The conversation highlights the critical role of inclusive design and the importance of community involvement in shaping technological solutions that address inequalities from the outset. 

 

In this episode: 

• The Role of Technology in Reducing Inequality: How technology can transform access to essential services by eliminating reliance on scarce human resources. 
• Community-Centric Approaches: The necessity of involving local communities when designing technological solutions. 
• Data Justice and Accessibility: Inclusive data and algorithms create inclusive technology. 
• Political Dimensions of Technology: The intersection of technology, policy, and the need for systemic change to address entrenched inequalities. 
• Wired and Rooted: Exploring the balance between being connected globally while staying grounded in local communities. 

Fair Enough is a podcast from UCL’s Grand Challenge of Inequalities, bringing together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to explore innovative ideas and solutions for delivering everyday justice. 

Fair Enough is proudly produced by Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative  

Creators and Guests

Host

Lauren Andres

Lauren Andres is Pro-Vice-Provost for Inequalities at UCL Grand Challenges. She is also Professor of Planning and Urban Transformations at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, where she serves as Director of Research. An interdisciplinary urban scholar, Lauren explores how cities adapt and transform in times of crisis, from pandemics to emerging technologies. Her work focuses on resilience, sustainability and social justice, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of vulnerable groups, including children and young people. Her recent research spans pandemic recovery, future crisis preparedness, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in urban governance, with projects across the UK, China, and globally.

Host

Victoria Austin

Victoria Austin is Pro-Vice-Provost for Inequalities at UCL Grand Challenges. She is also Associate Professor of Social Justice and Innovation at UCL Engineering and co-founder of the Global Disability Innovation Hub, a global organisation working across 40+ countries to drive disability innovation for a fairer world. She now serves as Strategic Director, having stepped down as founding CEO in 2024. Victoria’s research sits at the intersection of disability justice, technology and urban development, with a strong focus on participatory, real-world solutions. She teaches on UCL East’s Innovation for a Fairer World and co-leads a Master’s on global disability and technology.

What is Fair Enough? From UCL's Grand Challenge of Inequalities?

Fair Enough? is a new podcast from UCL’s Grand Challenge of Inequalities, asking a simple but urgent question: when it comes to tackling inequality, are we really doing enough?

In an increasingly divided world, where competing interests often pull us apart, what would solutions that most people consider fair actually look like?

Hosted by UCL’s Pro-Vice-Provosts for Inequalities, Dr Victoria Austin and Prof Lauren Andres, each episode brings together a UCL expert and a leading external voice. Blending research, policy insight and lived experience, these discussions challenge assumptions, unpack evidence, and explore what meaningful, systemic change could look like in practice.

At a time of growing political and social polarisation, Fair Enough? creates space for open, constructive dialogue. From economic divides and political representation to identity and cultural belonging, the series examines how inequalities shape our lives, and what it would take to address them.

Across the series, we explore three core themes: economic, political and cultural inequality, with a focus on how these issues play out across places and in an increasingly digital world.
New episodes are released monthly.

Whether you work in policy, research, industry, or simply care about building a fairer future, Fair Enough? invites you to be part of the conversation.

About the hosts:
Lauren Andres is Pro-Vice-Provost for Inequalities at UCL Grand Challenges. She is also Professor of Planning and Urban Transformations at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, where she serves as Director of Research.

An interdisciplinary urban scholar, Lauren explores how cities adapt and transform in times of crisis, from pandemics to emerging technologies. Her work focuses on resilience, sustainability and social justice, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of vulnerable groups, including children and young people.

Her recent research spans pandemic recovery, future crisis preparedness, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in urban governance, with projects across the UK, China, and globally.

Victoria Austin is Pro-Vice-Provost for Inequalities at UCL Grand Challenges. She is also Associate Professor of Social Justice and Innovation at UCL Engineering and co-founder of the Global Disability Innovation Hub, a global organisation working across 40+ countries to drive disability innovation for a fairer world. She now serves as Strategic Director, having stepped down as founding CEO in 2024.

Victoria’s research sits at the intersection of disability justice, technology and urban development, with a strong focus on participatory, real-world solutions. She teaches on UCL East’s Innovation for a Fairer World and co-leads a Master’s on global disability and technology.

Lauren Andres: Hello and welcome to Fair Enough, the new podcast from UCL Grand Challenge of Inequalities. It explores existing and emerging innovative solutions for delivering everyday justice. I'm Lauren Andros.
Victoria Austin: And I'm Victoria Austin. In this series, we'll bring together visionary leaders from across disciplines and sectors to ask one simple question. When it comes to tackling inequalities, are we doing enough?
Lauren Andres: So whether you work in industry, government policy or research, or you simply care about what a fairer future could look like, this podcast is for you.
Victoria Austin: Let's get started. In today's episode, we're going to explore how technology can support access to justice. We're joined by two brilliant guests. Welcome. Cathy Holloway. Catherine Holloway is a Professor of Interaction Design and Innovation at AH, University College London. The co founder and academic Director of the Global Disability Innovation Hub and co Director of the WHO Global Collaborating Centre on Access to Assistive Technology. She leads global work on disability innovation, inclusive design and the future of human technology relationships. Catherine has helped shape major programmes such as at 2030, which have reached more than 60 million people worldwide. Her research explores augmentation, belonging and how technology can expand human potential while reducing inequality. We're also delighted to be joined by Elly Savatia. Elly is a 25 year old technology optimist and social entrepreneur based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the founder and CEO of Signverse, an AI powered sign language accessibility company building real time and on demand translation using 3D avatars. His work focuses on bridging communication gaps for deaf communities across Africa through scalable technology driven infrastructure. He's a recipient of the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize and part of the google.org Generative AI Accelerator.
Lauren Andres: Welcome to both of you. I mean we're absolutely delighted to have you and we do have a first question for you both and maybe Elly we would like first to have your view on how can technology enable inequalities to be reduced. And here would be absolutely delighted to hear about the amazing work you've been doing.
Elly Savatia: Thank you very much. I think at its core, technology reduces inequality when it removes the dependency on scarce human intermediaries. So looking at the kind of work that we are doing and just tying this to accessibility, I think the bottleneck has always been people. So linking this to 80, you're looking at for example sign language interpreters, you're looking at specialists, you're looking at physical presence, in an ideal world that does not scale, so entire populations start getting excluded by default. So technology is now coming in here and what we're saying is that at its best, best, it's now turning access into infrastructure instead of a service. For example, tying this to something like sign language interpretation unit can exist on every website, on every video, in a classroom, in workplaces, then access stops being conditional. But I think the key point here is, technology doesn't reduce inequality just by existing, but, it reduces inequality when it is designed for the constraint of scaling from day one. And I just try and tie that to some of the lessons that we have here at Synverse. That's why we built our own motion capture studio to generate high quality sign language data sets and you know, create systems that can translate, you know, text and speech into sign language at scale. The point here is scale. The goal is not to like completely replace human interpreters, but to remove that barrier for access that is always present there. And I think that the broader lesson that I'm also drawing from this experience, you know, just building an assistive technology company, is that that bit of turning access into infrastructure, you know, rather than just as a service, removing that constraint and saying that it only works if it's designed from scale, but from the beginning. Otherwise you'd just be digitising the same bottlenecks that we've had over time. Yeah.
Victoria Austin: Elly can you give us a real world example? So when I did my PhD back in the day, I worked with disabled people who lived in an
00:05:00
Victoria Austin: informal settlement in Sierra Leone. And there a person who was deaf as part of my group of participants. And they weren't able to participate because there weren't any sign language interpreters in Sierra Leone at the moment. How could Signverse have helped in that situation?
Elly Savatia: That's a very good question, Victoria. so what you're looking at here is I think you've given an example of a participant who cannot, ah, participate. So here what we're looking at is, bringing in a tool that can be integrated into that setting and enable sign language interpretation. So the tool that we've built, ah, captures text and speech. ideally it would mimic what a human interpreter does and augment that capability into a software and enable sign language accessibility, for an area perhaps where human interpreter is not present. Yeah.
Victoria Austin: So I would have been able to use an iPad to translate my voice into sign language for that dev partition. That's amazing.
Lauren Andres: Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely amazing. I mean, before we turn to Kathy, who I'm sure has so much to add as well, I mean, Elly can you just tell Us a little bit how you do this, especially in African context, when you're working with vulnerable communities. I mean, noting, I mean, the difficulty not only to have access to tablet or a phone, but also just to access, Internet. I mean, I would love to hear a bit more about this as well.
Elly Savatia: Yeah, sure thing. so, I did. The core problem here is sign language accessibility. And what we've said is that we want to create technology that enables that access and, the realities of the context where we're coming from. Of course, this infrastructure kind of, issues perhaps access to Internet, access to power or perhaps mobile phone devices that are not as optimised. for starts, what we've done is we've created infrastructure to first enable us to collect localised sign language datasets. So we work very closely with the community here in Nairobi and its environments where they collect sign language. So all data is actually collected by the deaf community. Then we have, frameworks that enable us to also, do quality assurance on the data that is being collected. Actually, that work is going on right now in this studio.
Lauren Andres: Let me ask you to show it to us later.
Elly Savatia: So you can see at my back we have some of our animators, a
Victoria Austin: whole studio full of people busily entering data.
Lauren Andres: That's great.
Elly Savatia: Yeah, yeah. Then, beyond that, of course, there's the training, there's the processing of that data. Ah. Then we chose to actually deploy these, through websites for starts. of course later on we'd look at mobile applications. But while we looked at web, what we're looking at here, just looking at the infrastructure here. and of course our solution currently being one way in the sense of like we translate speech, text to sign language and the ease of us, perhaps integrating this technology on existing systems. So, like, we've just recently launched a service called tapweb. It's live on the Signbus website. We actually are onboarding a couple of corporate clients and what you're saying here is workplaces perhaps, want to incorporate persons with disabilities, but they do not have the tools to enable them. So what do we do? We are that partner that enables accessibility on top of digital ecosystems. And why we of course went through web. Web. We thought web was quick to deploy, it's faster to deploy, in terms of, iteration than just looking at constraints like Internet. Of course, to access the full infrastructure, it needs access to full Internet. But we're looking at possibilities of preloading animations that can handle basic translations like A, B, C to Z, which is just pretty much, the simplest way of communication which can be accessed offline. On top of that, also just looking at existing infrastructure that has been there before, and seeing how we can plug into perhaps, projects like Digischool, where Huawei is working on digitising schools in rural regions, and just sort of like plugging in and saying that we'll play our role here as an enabler for accessibility and of course just making sure that the usable design is embedded right in the DNA, as, ah, the solution is coming from the ground up.
Victoria Austin: Now I know why you've won so many prizes.
Elly Savatia: Thank you.
Lauren Andres: I think we all understand this. I mean, Kathy, you've been leading debates, leading, absolutely outstanding, in the field of disability innovation and inclusive design. I mean, what else do you want in a way to add to this first question? Because I'm sure there's just so much more, to cover here.
Cathy Holloway: thank you, Lauren. yeah, it's great to be here and great to be here with the brilliant Elly I've had the pleasure of watching Elly and Cynthus grow from afar, sometimes from afar, sometimes from a bit nearer. And I think it's fair to say that it's not just Elly being brilliant, it's also
00:10:00
Cathy Holloway: the fact that there is some infrastructural change that enables this to occur. Talking about mobile phones now being pretty much everywhere, doesn't matter where I fly in the world, you can get. And we've figured out that about $140, so an Android, Samsung, sort of a 40 model will allow you to do most of the AI processing or most of the things you need. Right. So that's great. And so you could imagine every school child who may be blind or deaf or hard of hearing or visually impaired or have some communication, impairment or difficulty, they should, you know, be able to have this phone. So that, that would be great. But of course, nearly everything, I'm sure Elly you'll agree, needs an Internet connection. And, and that's then where things begin to break down at the moment. We've recently done a very large study. It's 800 people across, three countries which were in three separate continents, 50% roughly blind and partially sighted, 50% deaf and hard of hearing. And we found that especially blind and partially sighted people, they were 2.6 times more likely to run out of their data, the monthly data bundled within a week. Why is that far more likely? If you were living in a rural Setting far more likely if you were female. So these inequalities compounded if you were blind and partially sighted and you were female and you lived rurally, you would run out of data within a week. And why is that? Mostly it's because of a lack of Internet access and the need to access Internet in say, route finding, which is beyond WI fi, capability. So I suppose that's just to give an example of, I think two things. One is we're reaching this inflection point where, brilliant entrepreneurs like Elly are leveraging both the advances of AI AI and the advances of digital infrastructure to be able to do exactly what Elly said, which was to overcome this structural barrier of not enough personnel. And let's be honest, why is there not enough personnel? There's not enough personnel because we as a global community haven't invested the money in it. We've chosen to put the money elsewhere. We've chosen to have policies and budgets that do other things. And so therefore there is this massive gap which constantly leaves, disabled people or persons with disability behind. in the UK it's a stubborn 30% employment gap. Doesn't matter which government comes in, it doesn't seem to change. and it's generally because we are not prioritising a co design solution across multiple domains of community and government. but going back to Elly it's also because we've got this digital infrastructure that we can now harness. And the thing about this, any technology is it is agnostic. I can build the best AI model in the world, I can get m wonderful results, I can get a collected data set. It gets these great results of sign language interpretation, for example. But let's say I don't include any people with white skin. I decide not to do that, then maybe my algorithms won't work as well. And what we found in the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion is that we have started collecting low resource language, spoken language from people with impaired speech, in local languages like ga, and airway. And then we have built the models and then we have worked with local entrepreneurs, to build the applications that are suitable for local environments. Working with our friends and partners across Africa and there. It's just a really simple principle. If you have inclusive data, then you have inclusive algorithms. And if you have inclusive algorithms, you have inclusive, infrastructure and apps. And you know, we just wouldn't build a metro system today or an underground system without wheelchair or like step free access. We just wouldn't do that. And yet increasingly in the digital world, we just build in these inequalities from the start. Like we've learned nothing from the last hundred or two hundred years. Which is only slightly frustrating though.
Lauren Andres: Yeah. And crazy as well. And I think, I mean this point as well, just really highlight the intersectional nature of inequalities because unfortunately I was. I mean, you mentioned gender, you mentioned issues around, digital divide. It's an accumulation of burdens.
Cathy Holloway: It's an accumulation of burdens. And it's also the fact that oftentimes people don't get. They often just get given the technology. I mean, one of the founding principles within the who's the definition of assistive technology is that it's beyond a product. Right. You know, me just giving you a wheelchair or a cochlear implant or, you know, you have to be able to learn how to use that wheelchair, but also you have to have agency, within that conversation. You know, obviously people should be teaching you the skills you need for what you wish to be doing. But you must have a product and a service. And often now we're seeing again things be given out to people, but nobody knows how to use them. Even Google found that, I think it was less than 5% of people were using Talkback, which is baked into, Android in India. And that's massive. Right? So they've managed to now increase that and they're working on that. But I think you'll find that even when devices ship with accessibility features, people don't know they're there. And then when they're given an assistive technology, people don't get the training. And then the assistive technology breaks, digital or otherwise, and the technology just breaks down, causing almost a worse dip in
00:15:00
Cathy Holloway: inequality.
Victoria Austin: Can I just, sort of add a bit of a reflection here? Because, I mean, Elly you call yourself a tech optimist and, that's kind of a bold statement in the world that we live in at the moment. I wonder, is there any part of you that feels tech pessimistic?
Elly Savatia: So I think, I think you want to look at both two sides of the coins. And I think one thing I just appreciate is, the potential for technology to create change. Of course, there is the uncomfortable reality that technology can perhaps, if you're looking at inequality, scale just as efficiently as it scales success. And I think Dr. Kathy has talked about, like, you know, data exclusion. So, like, for example, in our space, most AI systems for technologies that are doing research perhaps on the intersection of sign language and tech, are trained on data sets that perhaps don't include African sign languages. Right. And. Or even if you're looking at diverse signing style. So what happens is you build a system that works, but only for a small subset of people and then that becomes the default. So instead of inclusion, you end up getting some sort of like, standardised exclusion at scale. I think it's just being cognizant of. I think anything that has the potential to bring change also has the potential to bring damage. But I tend to see, myself as an optimist and say perhaps I can play my role, within my capabilities to try and make a little bit of change, but also just being cognizant of the constraints. And also, of course there's the benefit as well if you're also looking at another, perhaps, just tying to this second point, you know, what dangers that it can, you know, enhance inequality. and I'll. I think I'll be more biassed to the kind of work we do, you know, with sign language, understanding sign language, you know, it's not just hand gestures. You're looking at facial expression, you're looking at body posture, you're looking at even cultural nuance. So, like the work that we do in this motion capture studio, if that is not captured correctly in the data or in the model, so we end up not just building, an imperfect system, but pretty much just distorting it from the word go. So I think it's just being cognizant of this is what technology can do, but how can we design it in a way that we can mitigate m that risk and danger of creating, further inequality? Right. I think we can also talk about the economic sense bit of it. Right. If we tie accessibility to premium tools, so think APIs, think proprietary system, then we'd be looking at access now shifting from being unavailable and now creating sort of like it's recreating inequality in a different form. but I think the real risk here is perhaps, looking at it from a bias perspective. Right. So the questions that we need to be asking ourselves is who is getting encoded into the system, who is, defining the standard and who is left out? entirely.
Victoria Austin: Nice. I mean, I think it's worth noting because quite a lot of theoretical critique about technology and its potential to cause inequality, which is valid and important, and I'm sure we'll come to that in just a second, is largely generated from a Global north perspective. And I think when you're living in the reality of needing access, for example, to assistive technology, which the Global Report on Assistive technology tells us 2 billion people worldwide need access, 90% of whom do not have access to these devices, meaning they can't participate in work school, their, communities. The need to find solutions that are enabled cheaply through technology is redoubled, isn't it? It becomes so much more important. This is not a small group of people that need kind of very bespoke tools. This is something quite important that affects our entire global system. And moreover, if we can get these, did you call it data justice earlier? If we get these algorithms right for everybody, they're also better for everybody, right?
Cathy Holloway: Yeah, I'd agree with that, Victoria. Would you, Ellie?
Elly Savatia: Absolutely.
Victoria Austin: I mean, Kathy, what do you think?
Cathy Holloway: Well, I mean, I have a core tenet which comes from, because I'm an academic, it comes from a theory called the technology amplification theory, which I
00:20:00
Cathy Holloway: I came across a few years ago. And I've just, you know, I've always marvelled at it and that basically states that technology is never neutral, but it enhances the system it emanates from. So it will accelerate inequality. It will if that's the way it's been designed and it won't if that's the way it's been designed. So if we have all the right stakeholders in the room from the beginning, we have a lovely diverse mix of humanity and we co design not just the core tech, but the system in which that tech is being, you know, is being put into, then everything's going to work really well. And you know, your initial opening of all of this is fair enough, right? So, well, what is fair enough? And who gets to decide that? Right? You know, because right now, let's be honest, we give up a lot of data for companies, to train their algorithms to provide a service back to us. And as anybody who knows me knows, I love the next thing, right? So I will be using the next tech. I am known to have very many pairs of headphones, phones, very many devices, right. Even though I know that that's bad for the planet and I should not do that. I know that and yet I can't help myself, right? So that's, you know, but at the same time these things can be used for wonderful, wonderful good, right? And they can be your, they can be used to wipe us all out. So it's up to us as a society as to where we wish to put our priorities. It's us to us as a society to decide how we're going to make the world A fairer place. And I think if we were to be honest about it, we know. So these are known. We know there's algorithmic bias that's known. We know that automates and accelerates injustice. On the flip side of that, we know that there are people like Elly out there providing a wonderful counterbalance to that, and producing data sets that will counter that balance. But we also know there's a massive concentration of power. This is not about any particular company that owns a lot of data. It's not about one massive big tech against another massive big tech. But, you know, if we go back to the last industrial revolution, there was also a concentration of, power, right? And so we always have these new concentrations of power that we need to reflect on and decide, as a society how to move forward. But now it's more complex because in the last time around it was quite geographically bounded, right? And it was a little bit easier for a nation state to decide what they thought, you know, what resonated with their values, but also where they thought they could expand with. They thought they could refract what they thought they could do. And now, of course, we don't have that. We have this incredibly complex global, wonderful ecosystem in many ways. So I'm also an optimist on the basis that if we don't know what's going to happen, we might as well believe the best, because life's already too hard. but we do have this problem as well. I think if we're not careful of digital colonialism and just leaving out people who are not able to, to contribute and also to contribute their data in a way, which is, I think, fair enough. Like what is fair enough? If I give up my data for what we're seeing people give up data just to be paid small amounts of money, is that fair enough? You've got nothing to eat today, so you'll give up your money, you'll give up your data, but somebody else who has lots to eat would never make that choice. Is that fair or is it only fair if we get, you know, if we bake in something that's a little bit, a little bit better than that.
Lauren Andres: Those are very, very important question. I think the point on power is absolutely crucial. And one word we haven't heard yet is the word political. Because unfortunately, power is connected to politics and to political decisions. And when I'm hearing both of you, I think it just resonates to, I mean, wider political considerations, the current state of the world. As Catholic, he was mentioning around the current geopolitics. And I think here we need to remember that every decisions, every regulations that is going to be put in place at both national and international level is going to be linked to political decisions. When I'm listening to you, what comes into my mind, I've done a lot of work during the pandemic, working with vulnerable children and young people and their access to education. And we were looking at this in different contexts in England, in South Africa, in Brazil. And some of the points are absolutely resonating to what you're saying in terms of data injustice, in terms of digital divide. And one of the problem here, beyond the fact that the most vulnerable children were put out of education, some kids, especially in the most vulnerable communities, couldn't learn, during that time. But more importantly here, children and young people were not considered as a priority because they were not voting. So it goes back to the political, aspect of the narrative, and I think it's a virtual circle that I really hear behind everything you've
00:25:00
Lauren Andres: been saying.
Cathy Holloway: I mean, I 100% agree, Lauren. I could, go on for at least another half an hour about this, but I thought I should at least ask if Elie wanted to say anything on this topic before I jump on the bandwagon.
Elly Savatia: I think I wouldn't want to reiterate, but I fully agree on your sentiments. perhaps maybe touch on policy, you know, standards. Like, I think the work that, for example, ENABLE has been doing on, you know, standardising, you know, standards for assistive technology and policy, you know, the regulatory environment, you know, is it conducive, you know, to allow even perhaps innovation, you know, to thrive, within these ecosystems. So I fully, fully, fully conquer.
Cathy Holloway: So, yeah, I completely agree with Elly on standards. We're beginning to do some work in the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion on trying to standardise things, and I think that really does help governments to then move things forward. And returning to your point, Lauren, on, education and fairness, I think the thing that gets me out of bed every morning is, you'll be surprised to know it's not my marking. It's not my marking. No, it's not my marking. As much as I love you all, students, if you're listening, it's not marking. It's like a fire in my belly. To change the system, to help the people who are trapped in systems where the systems are continually failing them. When you're. Either you're young or you're, just in a position within society where you have limited power and agency, you know, these systems should work for you. There should be a health system, there should be an education system, there should be a justice system. And they should be there to protect you and help you navigate this world, right? And help you be able to, first of all feel safe, but then. Then be able to thrive. And when they fail you, and then they can repeatedly fail you, it's incredibly difficult to keep going. It's really very hard. And I think oftentimes when you start building these big policy documents or even these massive bids for money that obviously we need to get in order to do our research and hopefully move arguments, discussions, technology forward, I think I always have in the back of my head the people, because when you're there, it's so difficult to get going. And I just think if we can really think about how unfair these systems are, like, I almost think we're being too reasonable. We just keep discussing things and, you know, and producing. I don't know, Elly even in the disability world, how many documents or consultations you've been involved in, Right? And you could say that, I'm sure, for gender or, you know, any other, you know, any other group or country or, you know, region that's been. Is relatively less well off to another. Another set, right? And I remember years ago, my first ever time in Kenya, I was in an informal settlement just outside Nairobi, and we were doing an experiment. We were just trying to understand how do people use mobile phones? Like, can mobile phones be classed as an assistive technology? And there's a young, completely blind man called Mohammed, and he lived at a relatively small space, which we were invited into, and he really wanted to be part of this work. He wanted to tell us, and. And, you know, we had a local community member who was helping us with, like, the braille information sheets and all of these things. And then right before we started, he just said, sorry, you know, Catherine can I ask you a question? And so I said, of course. And he said, what makes you different from everybody else? And I said, what do you mean? I honestly didn't know what he meant. Honestly. The naivety was ridiculous. I said, I don't know what you mean, Mohammed. And he said, well, you know, you people, you come and you ask us questions and you write reports and you leave. But in Kibera, nothing changes. And it's just that we continued it. And honestly, to this day, it's 10 years later and I'm sometimes going to sleep still thinking of Muhammad, thinking, are we doing the right thing by him? Like could I look him in the eye and say, yes? You know, this is different. I promise you it's different. Right? Because it's so terrible to just go in and do research and just extract. Right. And especially if that also gives some sort of false hope because I feel like then you've done some sort of, double, injustice to people who are already more vulnerable than others. and yeah, and so I try each morning to think, how can we make the world, how can we, anything I'm doing today support that systematic change so that people are able to just do what they want to do and have the same chances as everybody else? and if we can just keep creeping towards that, that's great. And then somehow I've turned middle aged and I'm no longer. How old are you, Ellie? 20 something, I heard. I was like, oh my God, he can't be 20 something. Anyway, and I increasingly think, should I be doing this? Should I be trying to get people to be 5% better? Or should we just be more rageful about the whole thing and say, actually people, come on, what is wrong
00:30:00
Cathy Holloway: with us as a society? Why can't we do better?
Victoria Austin: Well, it's a good question. So thinking a little bit about kind of that question that Mohammed asked 10 years ago, what should we be doing now? And it's a lovely segue because, you know, Lauren and I are at the beginning of a programme which UCL has decided to back on inequalities. We've got a little bit of money, some time, some convening power, some partners, and we're really asking ourselves that question. So what's the most transformational thing we can do right now? Ali, do you want to go first?
Elly Savatia: Yes. So I think what I'm getting from this conversation I think is actually turning from inequality. And I think we've talked about policy, we've talked about even, you know, politics. And just looking at this, you know, if, if a community is excluded, you know, repeatedly, it's really because the technology is impossible to build, you know, more often, because that community was never treated as a priority in the first place. And I'm just trying to resound what Dr. Kathy has been saying. And I think that exclusion happens earlier, you know, in those budget decisions, you know, in policy discussions, in procurement decisions. What's getting funded, you know, who is getting funded or perhaps, you know, considering who is this worth building for? And just looking at the current state right now and trying to also tie that to this conversation I think what you're looking at here is how can we ensure that this accessibility itself, you know, is built into platforms and not considered an afterthought. I think some of the recommendations that I would have. Dr. Kathy has mentioned some of these, like, you know, investing in data sets, you know, tooling standards, regulation, like ah, wcag. I think it plays a very important role in just forging what the baseline for compliance should look like. But also, you know, how do we route these practises to community, you know, the people that are affected, you know, they must shape and validate the outputs and define what perhaps quality means. And this actually was one of the biggest takeaways that I had in the Innovate now programme by GDI Hub, Live Labs, programme. We have these very rigorous assignments where we interact with the end users and get to validate this is the problem that they're facing, get to study what their behavioural tendencies look like. How does that ah, fit into perhaps the programme that you're building? Like for us, for our case, some of the learnings that we got from that was that deaf people are visual beings. And at first we had started with using cameras to detect motion and actually we just had a shift. I think what we learned was at first that technology was not ready yet. At that time we had just ah, done a very basic prototype that would be able to classify A, B, C to Z. Then from those learnings they shifted us to looking at how now we can incorporate the learnings from Live Labs into what signbus is today. And I think the solution just morphed beyond that. And my key takeaways from that whole journey I think, was just how do we tie our work closely to this community, not just as users but as contributors. If you're talking about inequality, you're looking at data sets right away from the creation, you know, validation, iterating. And you know, without that technically we'd be risking, you know, building systems that are ah, fundamentally misaligned with the end user. So I think for us what you're looking at here is, you know, this principle is simple routing this directly to the end user. And I think I had coined this term, you know, like wired without rooted. You know, it's scalable but wrong. And if you're looking at rooted without being wired, it's, it's correct but it's, it's limited, fundamental. So I think it's that intersection of both, where inclusion really, really, really happens,
Lauren Andres: that Makes a lot of sense. I mean Kathy, what do you think? And especially, I mean you and Vicky have done it already for the GDI hub and you've developed an absolutely sensational initia. But I'm sure Cathy, you probably have even more to suggest to us.
Cathy Holloway: Honestly, I think we were very lucky when we set up the Global Disability Innovation Hub for a number of reasons. One, we had institutional backing ucl, but also the London Legacy Development Corporation. And I learned a great deal from Victoria back then about co designing at scale, how to get both political will at a big P and a little P. But how to.
00:35:00
Cathy Holloway: That was only the second step. The first step was really to listen to the community. And whilst I had been doing that in my engineering practise, it had been very much at less of a systems level, more of an individual developing a, ah, technology for a particular rehabilitation or for example developing the technology. I helped with everything from train design to wheelchair design, but it wasn't so systematic. It was very well defined engineering or computer science problems. and so I think co designing those things at scale really do need all the system actors in there and the diversity in there. And the second reason we were very lucky, when we set up GDI hub and Elly mentioned the live labs and I remember we suddenly got this £10 million to run the at 2030 programme from FCDO, from the UK government. and my job was to figure out how to run an accelerator potentially in Kenya. And I had two weeks in Kenya to do that, part of which was trying to find somebody to run it. And so I might have met about 50 people and I met Bernard Shearer and I thought he is the man that I think can do this. but also I spoke to Rebecca Shipley who was running the Institute of Healthcare Engineering here at UCL and asked her for what she thought. had worked very well and they had. The Institute of Healthcare Engineering had started having these spaces within hospitals where people could interact with technologies and maybe co design and thinking about. And I thought, thought that could work really well. And so we introduced the concept of live labs into the Innovate now curriculum which we developed actually with a good friend and a former PhD student of mine, a guy called Reese Williams, and we developed this curriculum and then that ran for a few years very well in Africa and then Bernard and the team there that is now called at 4D have developed and grown that and we've supported that. But it's a really good example I think of this global local economy, partnerships of equivalence. You know, people. We're working in Nepal, for example, with some amazing entrepreneurs and innovators, and yet we. We might have some very specific knowledge on prosthetic design or material science that can really support something to work a little bit better or just because we happen to be the global disability innovation hub and we go globally, we can match. We've got three entrepreneurs from different continents working together because they were working on a similar problem. And I think that's. That's the thing we need to work. You know, if there's like, what, you know, what can UCL do? What can we do at ucl? I think we use our platform, to convene, but we also use our depth of knowledge. We are so lucky. The number of hospitals. We have, the number, and just the fact we're this beautifully flat university. Like you can just pick up the phone to anybody and generally they will want to work with you. I've very rarely, I don't think ever have, as anyone I've heard of us, you know, something where we've decided not to work together. And so I think that really helps us be able to move quite much more quickly, actually. I'm sure it causes some headaches for the, I don't know, the deans and the provosts and people. But for the rest of us, we're very happy because we get to move really quickly and sort of do things at scale and trial things. Because we all know, and Elly said at the beginning there that, you know, when they first started, they were using vision and then people don't want to be filmed, right? So we don't want to do that. So what we're able to do is do that trialling, testing, and failing quite quickly because a lot of stuff is done on goodwill, actually. I mean, if UCL could record the amount of goodwill, the amount of work that's unfunded by anybody that is done to try and seed the big things that we get. It's a, phenomenal blanket. It's like, it's this wonderful woven web, across UCL that I just think, you know, 200 years old this year, and we've just created this brilliant blanket that we're all lucky enough to be a very small thread on, but somehow together were incredibly strong.
Lauren Andres: I think this is very powerful words and it really shows everything you've been doing. And I think it also demonstrates something which is probably important is, I mean, getting together, pushing for change, but also learning from failures. And, I think that's a really important point where we often tend to learn from failures and actually often innovation and progress comes from failure because we can't get it right right away. And I think again, I mean, as you were both saying, I mean really getting the right people together, the right consortiums, the right knowledge, the right energy and the right in way trust and willingness to move things forward is really key.
Cathy Holloway: The one thing I didn't mention earlier was just Elly you mentioned Wired and Rooted. And this is something I've been trying to develop. because I feel like it's not just about being wired into the world. Right? We all want to be connected, but somehow we want to stay grounded and rooted not just to ourselves, but to our communities. And I feel like if we stay really rooted into our communities, then this beautiful trunk grows which sort of can develop into like branches of Wired. And then somehow we get that feedback from the wired and we can feed that back to our community. And there's something in there, I think about Wired and Rooted
00:40:00
Cathy Holloway: that is both on an individual level about how we show up every day, like how do we make sure we are grounded but also able to perform if you like, then also at a community level, how does that grow or scale? And then almost like there's a forest of these wide and rooted things which is how we are all now interconnected across the globe. And how do we do that in a fair way?
Victoria Austin: I love that.
Elly Savatia: I also meant to just add something slightly, convening across sectors. I think accessibility sits at the intersection of, from this conversation you can clearly tell there's academia, there's industry, there's government, there's community. And these groups rarely align naturally. And I think even the work that UCL has been doing, GDI have been, I think just that ability to act as that sort of like middle neutral convener and bring all these sectors together and you know, to define, you know, what shared standards look like, you know, what shared priorities looks like, and even, you know, pathways to adoption. You know, if you're looking at pathways to adoption and if it's academia, you know, how do we look at, you know, translating, you know, from research to deployment, you know, and just bridging that gap, but that cross sector convening. And I think if those things are done well, I think the output would not just be research or deployment, but you'd have like some systemic level kind of change and just aligning to what Kathy has talked about, really rooting that to the source.
Victoria Austin: Yeah, I really like that. It's Been a really interesting conversation today. We've kind of galloped right across a lot of hot topics. My big takeaways are that we still need to really prioritise mainstream m accessibility in the technology that exists. We need data justice both in the collection and the decision making about what data we're using and for which purpose. Brilliant products and innovations like Ellie's will continue to be really important, especially for specific communities. Co design is vital not just for the sake of it, but to get the technology right. And because participation is the means as well as the end of development, as Sen reminded us many, many times. But that co design doesn't just extend to communities developing individual technologies, it also extends to whole system actors that need to engage in changing the space which technology finds itself within. And that involves a lot of critical thinking and I think sometimes that can be lost in the debate. Elly I really liked your point about technology is ready. Like almost all of these things are no longer technical problems, they're socio political problems. And it's our job, I guess, using the convening power and the opportunity that UCL has to maybe think about how we can stay collectively rooted as we're increasingly wired. And that for me is the kind of big point of our conversation today. I'm so grateful to you both for spending this time with us. It really has helped me see things in a new light.
Lauren Andres: It was absolutely fascinating. And yes, we've learned so much and I'm sure those who are going to listen are also going to learn so much. And I think from our perspective, it's really a matter of continuing the dialogue, the conversation, going with everything. Vicky and I are going to shape in the future. But before we end, we always have a final question, for our guest and we would like just to ask you if you had one book, one film or one artwork that would capture the ethos of fair enough, what would it be and would you be happy to share with us? Kathy, do you want to go first?
Cathy Holloway: Sure. I nearly did a shameless plug for my youngest brother's book. Obviously, the best young, Irish writer going m But actually I think I will say that whilst Patrick's book is amazing, that's the Language of
Victoria Austin: Remembering by Patrick Holloway.
Cathy Holloway: Exactly. Everyone should buy a copy for all their friends. but I was lying in bed last night thinking about this and I decided it was Florence and the Machine. Everybody scream yes, because I think we are all being too reasonable about inequality. And when you are systematically discriminated against, I don't think screaming is hysteria. I think it's like an honest nervous system response. And I love that Florence just named it and did this song and doesn't sing it softly. But when you see her live, the energy in that crowd when everyone is screaming is phenomenal. you know, some sort of embodied aliveness and a refusal for some sort of false civility that we seem to just go along with. So I believe we should all just scream.
Lauren Andres: Love that. And I think actually Annabelle, who's going to produce our podcast, should probably add this song at the end of this episode.
Cathy Holloway: I think, honestly, anything by Florence is amazing, but nobody scream is perfect.
Lauren Andres: Elly
Elly Savatia: I'd go for a song, I love Coldplay. That song is called Fix youx.
00:45:00
Elly Savatia: I love the instrumentals behind that song, the orchestra version about it. But I think that song captures the idea that, you know, systems and people can be broken, but there is still an effort. sometimes it can be imperfect. It can be a process, work going on, you, know, to repair, you know, to support and just rebuild, you know, these systems. And I think for me, Fair Enough lives, in that space of not perfection, but an intentional effort to make things better just over time. Yeah. So fix you, Coldplay. I think I would resonate with that.
Victoria Austin: I love that definition of fair enough. Can we keep it?
Elly Savatia: Please do.
Lauren Andres: We should. And I love the fact that we had two songs today. It's brilliant.
Cathy Holloway: Quite differing ones. Ones too.
Lauren Andres: Exactly.
Cathy Holloway: Which is brilliant.
Lauren Andres: Thank you so much, both of you.
Cathy Holloway: Thank you.
Lauren Andres: It was so wonderful to have you.
Victoria Austin: Thanks for your time today, guys.
Cathy Holloway: Elly great to see you. Great to see you too.
Victoria Austin: You've been listening to Fair Enough, a podcast from UCL's Grand Challenge of Inequalities. This episode was presented by me, Victoria Austin and Lauren Andres and produced and edited by Annabelle Bogg at Decibelle Creative. If you'd like to hear more thought provoking conversations, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. To Explore more about UCL's grand challenge of Inequalities, including our latest news, events and research, just Google UCL's grand challenge of Inequalities. Thanks for listening.
00:46:41