How to make design really inclusive | Florence Okoye | TEDxBrum

[Music] yeah I'm a user experience designer a fairly trendy new field in this day and age and my job I primarily work with digital products so mostly web sites and apps and I do my best to make them as accessible and usable and hopefully even ethical as possible and as someone who works primarily in the world of the digital I'm always really interested by the president set by designers and design movements of the past in particular child and Ray Eames respectively an architect and artist who became product designers who are responsible for some of the most innovative and iconic furniture of the 20th century and were known for using materials like plywood in exciting and innovative ways to create a deeply functional and humanist or still beautiful accessible technologies and one of the things that I find particularly inspiring about that their work is this fundamental design philosophy that permeates to their products and that's this idea of the relationship between the designer and the user as a sort of guest-host relationship in fact Charles Eames would go into this in more detail to quote for him the designer or the architect or whoever it was making this product their role was that akin to a good and thoughtful host all of whose energy goes into predicting and anticipating the needs of their user and so as we look at the technologies and the products that we use every day that we have become so dependent on it's often actually quite shameful to see how often that guest host or indeed the host guest relationship actually breaks down I mean just think about how your favorite mapping tool insists that the best way to get to your friend's house in November at 9:00 yeah it's under the bridge of a poorly lit can now like off not so sure about this or think about how difficult it is to let your favorite social media platform know that you've faced harassment and abuse from racist and misogynist online every day we are faced by examples of the way that our services do not live up to this guest-host relationship and I think it's paramount for us who are designers of these systems to ask why after all design has evolved we don't or at least we're not meant to design for the quasi Platonic ideal phrases like inclusive design but is a participatory design community-led design these are all phrases and methodologies that we constantly refer to with our everyday design speak and yet as someone who's quite interested in critical theory I often wonder if part of the problem is that the way we use these actually quite radical methodologies still ends up centering the designer at the heart of the product and so we end up in a situation where even when using inclusive design frameworks in a sense the designer is still at the center of it all only in this case they deign so graciously to allow the user some input at some point in the design journey I often think this is also exemplified in our incredibly simplistic ways of describing empathy now empathy is very popular now you know you hear all the designers talk about it we're meant to design with empathy omentum and pathetically design and yet what i find interesting is when we talk about what this means we often use incredibly simplistic note metaphors such as put yourself in the other person's shoes often forgetting that the shoes of the other are not in fact on the same plane and this is an insight that sociologists and historians and critical theorists alike have consistently and repeatedly remind us of and yet as designers we so often forget in some ways empathy is not some universe or transcendent but a substance that has its own flow and that flow goes according to the different gradients of relative social privilege in fact if we go bit go backwards a bit and really think about this metaphor for guests and hosts we kind of realize how absurd these quite simplistic notions of designing with empathy are after all a third guest is say my best friend Sonia was coming over for dinner I wouldn't think okay broccoli green beans let me empathize put myself in her position no I would have taken the time to have found out and I really engage with her to understand what her preference in green vitamin D which vegetables were as such to speak of empathy without understanding the effort involved to overcome the impedance provided by relative social privilege is in a way of nonsense to quote her Eamonn an empathy that is still built in social privilege that does not force us to go beyond our comfort zone to fully engage with the user can often be an impediment Justin Moore a professor of architecture at Columbia University often talks about the need to redesign the designer and he talks about this in in two main contexts one for us to seriously question and ask ourselves like who gets to become designers why it is that the pipeline is so non diverse in spite of the fact that often these designers are meant to be designing for diverse if not fully global populations part of his question about how we redesign the designer also asks about how exactly are we educating and teaching designers to enable them to holistically consider the needs of their users and I think there's a third aspect of this as well which ties into that not only for those of us who are serious about inclusive design might we also start thinking about the way we can actually distribute design knowledge amongst the very communities we work with but it also makes question the depth of our own practices how we are fully engaging and including the user as we design systems which will impact their everyday life and so if empathy is not enough then what is needed is a deliberate consistent and embedded engagement with our users with the other now someone might ask okay hold on hold on hold on one does not want to appear tokenistic and at this point I urge everyone to almost take a step back and really look at this sudden little Isle of ours that breaks up the Atlantic Ocean so hopefully and to really consider the social inequalities and paradigms that we exist in we exist in a country where the black prison population population is seven times greater per per population and this is interesting in comparison to someone like the United States were only four times well only four times we live in a country where actually only five years ago several major cities did a census and some of them found that up to twenty twenty three or higher thousand people within their cities were actually technically malnourished leaves as a particular example we also live in a country in a world where there are some County some administrative regions where the life expectancy differs by over a decade this is the country we live in and so our concerns about perhaps appearing tokenistic or our concerns about budget really pale in comparison to the to the desperate desperate divisions and issues that are at work within our society as designers it is key to remember empathy is not enough what is needed is a consistent engagement with the other and I will put it monthly because usually in design circles we tend to speak driving euphemistically let me say this whoever you are as a designer if you're designing a product ensure that it is at least tested and used and considered in the context of someone as different from you as possible if we have to be that literal so beer because that is what is needed particularly in an age where our technologies are designed environments are becoming ever smarter ever more sophisticated using reams of data which we don't fully know where they come from and gathering data form us in ways we don't fully understand empathy is not enough and quite frankly in the age of AI and big data powered chat BOTS and in an age where people are dreaming up direct interfaces between human brains and the internet and self-driving taxis to Mars in an era of deep mind and deep learning I think it's time that we started designing a little bit deeper thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 4,425

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Design, Coding, Ethics

Id: 7M-VSI9RuPU

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017