Communication Is a Two-Way Street

I've been thinking a lot about communication standards—who sets them, who follows them, who can get away with breaking them, and who can't.

Our thesis at Valence Vibrations has been that the burden of altering communication has been unduly and unequally placed on the most marginalized people in a given conversation.

Whether that be a Black DEI expert being expected to "check her tone" or code-switch when educating a team, or an autistic man having to mask his natural microexpressions in his workplace, or an immigrant taking accent-reduction classes to make it easier for others to understand them—we are constantly asking people to alter their natural expressions to make others comfortable.

And this behavior continues because we expect it to. I say *we* because as humans, we all struggle to correctly identify patterns we are less familiar with. And just as it's hard to identify a Golden Pheasant from a Partridge if you've never seen either, it's difficult to correctly perceive someone's emotions when you have limited experience of them or of other people with their exact demographics.

Our advisor, Sharena Rice refers to our goal for Vibes as an emotional passport, able to experience and learn from the patterns of a more diverse set of voices than we're typically encountering (and encoding) on a regular basis.

If you’d like to try Vibes for Apple Watch, you can download it here.