Toxic Tie, 2019.

The Toxic Tie is a speculative design piece intended to make a statement on misogyny in the workplace. It recognizes when misogynistic words or phrases are spoken and reacts by folding up and tapping the wearer on the face to inform the wearer that they need to check themselves and consider the impact of their words. Additionally, it rewards the wearer for saying something complimentary. Toxic Tie was created to take action on workplace sexism without people worrying about facing consequences for standing up and calling someone out. Our website (sonia9uppal.github.io/toxictie) allows women to input misogynistic phrases that they gave heard in the workplace to help train our tie to better react in these situations. We hope to empower and support women by showing them a a bulletin of all of the crowdsourced phrases that others have submitted to show that they’re not alone in this fight.