From Accentism Theory
to Personal Urgency
My design journey began with a question about voice. Specifically, how accents operate as a quiet boundary. Accentism , the conscious or unconscious bias against how someone sounds, was the term I found. At first, it seemed like a linguistic issue. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became that this was about power. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence offered a way to frame it. The idea that domination doesn’t always announce itself. It settles in, through norms and repetition, until inequality feels like common sense (Bourdieu, 1991). Accent bias became a vivid example. Certain voices, polished, familiar, coded, are heard as capable. Others are marked, misread, or ignored. This isn’t preference. It’s hierarchy.
Theory helped me see the structure. But it was lived experience that made it urgent. I knew the pressure to adjust. To soften. To perform neutrality. I had heard it in my own speech, and in the quiet edits made by others. A recent industry report confirmed it: over 77 percent of creatives felt pressure to change their accent at work to be taken seriously (Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK, 2023). These stories were familiar. They turned research into recognition. The impact was not just professional. It was personal. It was creative. Voice, once a site of expression, became something to manage.
What emerged was not just analysis. It was conviction. Accentism isn’t just structural. It is embodied. It shapes how people speak, and how they are heard. Any design response, I realised, had to speak to both. Not just the policy. But the body. Not just the system. But the self.
Embracing Speculative Design: The Path to Voices of Creativity
Turning research into design was not straightforward. I began with practical ideas, toolkits, workshops, campaign materials. But they felt limited. Accent bias is not just a problem of awareness. It is structural. Emotional. Embedded. It does not always announce itself, but it is always present. I needed a method that could hold that complexity.
Speculative design offered that space. It allowed me to ask what if, not as provocation for its own sake, but as a way to imagine alternatives. What if our institutions genuinely valued every voice? What if sounding different was not something to conceal, but something to build from? These questions were not abstract. They were urgent. Speculation gave me a way to design from that urgency.
I was not aiming to produce a tool in the conventional sense. I wanted to make bias felt. To hold up a mirror to something quiet but constant. Accentism is rarely named. It hides in tone, in reaction, in the silence after you speak. Speculative design let me name it without resolving it. It gave me a way to invite others into that discomfort too.
Voices of Creativity formed in that space. Not as a solution, but as a platform for holding tension. A designed reflection made from lived experience, critique, and creative practice.
Building the Platform: Two Interlinked Components
The platform developed around two core parts: the Bias Mirror and Capsule Stories. One reveals. The other remembers. Together, they hold the complexity of this work, critique and care, exposure and empathy.
Bias Mirror
This tool came from a single question: how can bias be made visible? The Bias Mirror asks users to listen to creative pitches in a range of accents. Each pitch contains the same content. Afterwards, the user reflects. What changed? What did they assume? What did they feel?
The interface is minimal by design. There is no distraction. Just voice, space, and reflection. The purpose is not to shame. It is to pause. To hold a moment long enough to notice what we are usually too fast to feel. As Bourdieu argues, symbolic violence does not need to be spoken. It becomes embedded in what feels normal (Bourdieu, 1991). The mirror asks us to question that normal.
Developing the concept brought discomfort. I had to ask myself: would I want to hear how others hear me? Would I recognise my own assumptions? That discomfort stayed in the design. It became part of the ethics.
Capsule Stories
If the mirror reveals bias, the capsules preserve voice. Capsule Stories hold audio recordings from creatives across disciplines and regions. Each person tells a story in their own voice, accent, and pace. No edits. No apology. Just presence.
The idea is speculative, but grounded. I imagine a future where these stories are required listening in creative education, not as case studies, but as cultural insight. Designing the capsules was emotional. I thought about every conversation where someone spoke of being misheard. Of being asked to repeat. Or soften. Or speak again, but differently. I wanted to hold those voices. To treat them not as exception, but as knowledge.
Listening becomes a practice. A slow one. The capsule design invites this. Each story asks: will you stay with this voice? Will you let it lead?
A Platform in Tension: Between Critique and Care
The Bias Mirror and Capsule Stories evolved together. One provokes. The other holds. The mirror makes things sharp. The capsules bring repair. Their interaction shaped the tone of the platform. Each one softened or strengthened the other.
The platform is not seamless. It is not finished. It holds contradiction. It is a speculative site built to contain discomfort, not to dissolve it. I used critique sessions to test this tension. Feedback pushed me to ask where clarity was needed, and where uncertainty should remain. I chose to keep the complexity. To resist smoothing it over.
This is not a product. It is a provocation. It holds what is hard to say.
What This Intervention Makes Possible
This platform did not come from a brief. It came from rupture. From learning that voice can be treated as a flaw. The design followed that realisation.
Now, it offers a tool for design education. A way to slow down conversations about bias. To make them felt. To centre stories that do not always get space. It offers a speculative form that can sit inside critique spaces, team workshops, or industry discussions.
Voices of Creativity also becomes a model. It shows how design research can hold tension. How critique and care can sit side by side. How lived experience can be carried through interface, voice, and structure.
The platform opens a possibility. A future where we listen differently. Where voice is not corrected to fit, but held as it is. Where education values not just polish, but presence. Where design makes space for the full range of what it means to be heard.
Sources and Citation
The references used throughout this journal and critical report were drawn from academic theory, lived context, and media that reflect the present tense of the creative industries. Wherever possible, I returned to original texts, Bourdieu, Cameron, Lippi-Green, Pille, to stay close to the language that shaped the thinking. Their ideas grounded the conceptual framework. Reports from The Sutton Trust and Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK provided the current data I needed to connect theory with the everyday. I also included The Guardian’s reporting on accent bias in creative work. It helped anchor abstract terms like symbolic violence in contemporary language and lived effect.
The selection process was iterative. Sources were chosen based on how they resonated with experience, mine and others’. Some came early. Others arrived after sketches, conversations, hesitation. The speculative elements of this work were informed by Dunne and Raby’s design fiction, but reinterpreted through personal necessity. Studies by Todd et al. and Galinsky and Moskowitz on empathy and bias reduction shaped how the Bias Mirror was framed, not as correction, but reflection.
All references have been cited in APA style. They are present in both the writing and the making. Not just to show where knowledge came from, but to keep the work accountable to its sources.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK. (2023). The language of discrimination: Class barriers and accent bias in the creative industries. Creative Access.
Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.
Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Sutton Trust. (2024). A class act? Social mobility and the creative industries. London: The Sutton Trust.
Todd, A. R., Bodenhausen, G. V., Richeson, J. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2011). Perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(6), 1027–1042.
Galinsky, A. D., & Moskowitz, G. B. (2000). Perspective-taking: Decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 708–724.
Zoya, Z. (2025). Giving everyone a voice in a Gen AI age. Creative Review.
