Challenging design
This essay was adapted from a Creative Mornings Edinburgh talk given on the topic of Design on October 27th, 2021. The talk can be watched on YouTube here.
This is the Sears & Roebuck mail order catalog.
It was a staple of early 20th century American life. Anyone in the US could order this catalog for free, look through it, and have anything their heart desired delivered to their doorstep — a pretty big feat for the early 1900s.
Now Sears wasn’t the first company to offer catalogs of this kind, but it came to dominate the mail order world — its founder, Richard Sears, was a very clever marketer and designer. Sears was aware of his competition, but also of the context in which his catalogs existed. Most households would have the Sears catalog along with the Montgomery Ward catalog, their competitor, in their home.
So he purposefully made his catalog just a little less wide and just a little less tall than the Montgomery Ward catalog. This design decision was intentional — he knew that catalogs were placed on coffee tables, and were most likely to be neatly stacked one on top of the other. By designing the catalog this way, for the stack to be neat, the Sears catalog would always be placed on top. Prime real estate in the family home.
I love this example. It perfectly embodies three crucial things about design.
First of all, everything is designed. Every experience, every service, every object you interact with on a daily basis, has been designed. And on top of that, it’s often designed a lot more than you might give it credit for. On first inspection, the Sears catalog looks pretty much like any other catalog. But the time and effort that went into each element, each page, cannot be understated. Anyone who has worked with or on a design team can testify to that.
Secondly, design influences behaviour — even when we are not aware of it. Each time someone stacked that Sears catalog on top of the other catalogs giving it prime retail space in the middle of a home, Sears design succeeded. There’s a human bias called the Mere Exposure Effect that states that by simply seeing something more regularly, you’re more likely to use it. I’m not sure how much Sears knew about this effect, but I’d hazard a guess that he had a hunch about its power.
And finally, design is a strong signal of societies accepted values at the time. Between 1865 to 1920 in the US, economic development reached an extraordinary pace as industry and, increasingly, agriculture became capitalisms primary focus. And with those industries being based outside of cities, and with suburbs and shopping malls not really becoming a thing until the 50’s, mail order catalogs bridged the consumption gap between the wealthy rural areas that were booming and cities that offered the consumable good. Society wanted to spend money, and be seen to have money to spend. Having a mail order catalog, and the items it sold in your home, was a signal of wealth and flourishing in a difficult time.
Let’s look at another example — this bench.
You probably recognise this as an incredibly uncomfortable seating solution that’s littered across the city’s bus stops. Pretty good for leaning on, but not great for a long term seat. These bus stops are part of a collection of designed items that architects would refer to as hostile architecture. It’s an urban design strategy that uses elements of our built environment to purposefully guide or restrict unwanted behaviour.
So again, if we look at those three points I mentioned earlier:
While this might seem like a chair that was designed by someone who hates being comfortable, it was designed for a specific purpose that is hard to tell from immediate inspection. The slant on the bench means that it’s difficult to sit on and more importantly, impossible to lay on. It was designed to stop folks who are homeless from sleeping here.
And there’s many variants of these types of chairs — chairs that have dividers, chairs that are curved, chairs that are exceptionally slim. Striking the balance between quasi function for folks waiting 10 minutes for a bus, and nothing more, likely took many iterations to get right.
Secondly, design influences behaviour — and this does that quite effectively. It is basically impossible to sit on a chair like this for long, and most importantly, it’s impossible to lay down and sleep on. Now research has shown that while these chairs are pretty good at stopping folks from laying down, they have little to no impact on improving the number of homeless folks sleeping rough on the street. Funny that (!)
Finally, this reflects cities as spaces not for comfort, but for productivity at all costs. It’s not a place to rest, to relax, or to take safety if you find yourself sleeping rough some night. It tells us this space is exclusive, so don’t make yourself at home here — unless you can pay for it. It also tells the folks in our society who are disabled, or elderly, or tired, or pregnant, that here is not a space for you to take rest. It signals that our cities value productivity, and movement, above all else.
And of course, not all design is physical. In this digital age, design comes in some many different forms. Take for example, Alexa, who may be encased in a physical device, but is a conversational UI that shipped 10.4 million units worldwide in 2019 alone. As human beings, we can’t help but personify objects, especially if they show tendencies that we also possess. We are really narcissistic. But that’s what makes conversational UI’s great — Alexa is the personal assistant you didn’t know you needed.
But who is Alexa really?
This is something that researcher Evie Cheung was curious about. Evie Cheung published ‘Alexa, Help Me Be a Better Human: Redesigning Artificial Intelligence for Emotional Connection’ and it’s available online. It details a year long project exploring AI as a tool to explore human psychology, and I couldn’t recommend it more. During the project, She facilitated a co-creation workshop with a number of participants, and tasked them to draw what Alexa would look like as a human being. They were asked about Alexa’s perceived race, political beliefs, and hobbies.
And what emerged was that Alexa was perceived as a a quote
“…subservient white woman who couldn’t think for herself, apologised for everything, and was pushing a libertarian agenda.”
So if everything is designed, then who designed this? Conversational ui design is something I have personal experience in, and it’s incredibly difficult to get right. There’s a lot of factors you need to consider — tone, error handling, etc It likely has some level of AI and machine learning too, that has been trained to respond to certain situations with different sentiments. Who did they have in mind when they were making these design decisions that would go on to impact millions of people?
How might something like Alexa, or Siri who sounds not too dissimilar from Alexa, influence how we behave? Cheung was particularly concerned about this with young children, who she feared would grow up conditioned to expect subservience and over apologetic responses from the folks with feminine voices around them in their environment.
And finally, what does this say about our values? How does it reflect how we perceive feminine people? Why was Alexa ‘Alexa’? And not ‘Alex’ or AI the robot?
When we look at those three things — that everything is designed, that design can influence us without us realising, and that design is a reflection of accepted values — I hope you would agree that this makes design incredibly powerful. It can sculpt society in a way that cannot be understated. And it signals to those around us who and what we prioritise. Everything is designed for and by someone. And for anyone who has experienced the edges of design, or who have realised that an experience was not designed for them, the impact can range from frustrating to fatal.
Sinead Burke, entrepreneur, author, activist, and designer, explains this impact perfectly in her Ted talk on design. She spoke about how, as a little person, the world really isn’t designed for her or people like her. The whole talk is brilliant, and I would highly recommend giving it a watch, but one line stood out to me the most:
“Design inhibits my autonomy and independence. I often forget I’m a little person. It’s the physical environment and society that reminds me.”
I want to talk to you today about the challenge of design — the challenges we have as designers when creating experiences, and how we as consumers and designers can challenge the designs we experience in our day to day lives.
But first, let me introduce myself a little. My name is Emily Horgan and I’m a User Researcher. User research is fundamental to making sure that products and services are built for purpose, and I get the pleasure of speaking with people pretty much every day, understanding exactly what it is folks need from a service. I deliver recommendations based on what I learned and observed in interviews with customers. And I try to keep informed on things like psychology, behavioural science, and politics to understand the climate and context of the folks I work with. User research is a relatively new title for me.
I got my undergrad in Computer Science and from there began a journey through a variety of different roles and projects in and around the tech space.
Some highlights were working as a Product Lead on Allichat, a conversational UI ‘catbot’ that helped young people understand the basics of cognitive behavioural therapy. I recently worked alongside Monstrous Regiment and my partner Zach to curate and edit So Hormonal, an anthology of personal essays on hormones. And I just wrapped up a two year stint working as a product designer and UX researcher at FreeAgent, creative mornings sponsor.
A couple of years ago, I started to feel a bit uninspired by the design industry. I was working in UX and product, but I was looking around me and felt like I was becoming complacent. I felt like a lot of design was driven by ego, and not customer need. I didn’t feel like I was being as thoughtful as I could be. And I was struggling to feel like I was making an impact.
It was around this time that I came across the Design Justice Network, and the work of Sasha Costanza Chock. The Design Justice Network is an international community of people and organisations who are committed to rethinking design processes so that they centre people who are too often marginalised by design.
Folks who are members work according to a set of principles that were generated and collaboratively edited by the network itself. It has nodes globally, and at the time I came to the network, a couple of Scottish based folks were looking at setting up a node here in Scotland. It felt like the perfect opportunity to refresh my practice and gain some perspectives.
I came to the node looking for all of the answers to the big questions I had swirling around my head.
Spoiler — I didn’t find answers. If anything, I found myself asking more questions than ever.
My first couple of sessions with DJN felt inspiring but frustrating — I was expecting a checklist, some ways to apply these principles in practice, a flowchart of sorts that I could apply in all design situations and always land at the most ethical, inclusive answer. And that’s not surprising — when we live in a society that values fast consumption and hyper consumerism, it’s no surprise that I wanted a quick fix to a big problem. But that’s not how these things work. It’s not that easy- and particularly when it comes to design, which holds such influence and can send such strong societal signals, like we saw in the opening examples.
So there were no bullet lists or answers, and I’m still learning how best to embody these principles in my day to day work and life. DJN has given me a space to explore those questions and teasing them out in a supported environment. I’ve already learnt so much, so I wanted to share some of the key things that the DJN principles led me to consider over the past couple of years that which challenged both my design practice, and the designs I engage with on a daily basis.
Lesson 1: It’s not about you
First and foremost: Ego is the biggest blocker to inclusive and ethical practices. This comes across strongly in the majority of the principles of DJN: The designer is a supporter, not someone who knows everything, The impact of the design in more important than the aim of designer.
When you see yourself as above criticism, above learning, you’re left in a position where your work and critical lens reflects back your own ego to others. And while that may not seem like a massive issue on the face of it, a lack of input and willingness to learn is becoming increasingly dangerous. We have voice technology that doesn’t recognise women in self driving cars, facial recognition technology that cannot recognise black and brown folks used by the police, and medical forms that reduce gender to a binary used to access critical healthcare. By only centring ourselves in a design, are not only creating an inherently exclusive experience, but also a worse one. Creating inclusive designs benefits everyone, and there’s actually a name for it:
“CURB EDGE EFFECT”
The name itself comes from curb edges, which were designed to help folks in wheelchairs safely mount and dismount footpaths, but which benefit everyone — whether you’re wheeling a suitcase, pushing a pram or a bike. Another good example is closed captions — these are crucial for folks who are hard of hearing to engage in a video content, but also benefit those who are in a noisy pub, or at home watching Netflix.
Inclusive experiences begin with inclusive design practices, and co-design is a really brilliant way to achieve this. Co-design allows you to hire, train, and include willing members of the community you are working with to be fully involved in the design decision process. This is reflected in Principle 2 and Principle 6: People affected by design decisions should be at the centre of the design process and Every person knows more about their own experiences than anyone else.
Allichat used co-creation and co-design practices and it was probably the most enjoyable project I’ve worked on so far in my career. I could sit here and do a whole other talk on the benefits of co-design, what co-design is and isn’t, but instead will leave you with some recommendations for further reading. Beyond Sticky Notes originated as a book, which goes into detail on how to run a co-design project without just exploiting the folks of the community you are building for, which is often the case in co-design. But if you visit the website, there’s actually a tonne of other resources including card decks, a mindset document and my favourite — A quiz to get you thinking about co-design and how to practice it ethically.
Lesson 2: Should we add something? Or remove it?
The second takeaway comes from Principle 10: We reflect on what is already working before coming up with new ideas.
Something I always keep in the back of my mind when I’m working with community members and clients is whether something needs to be added, or needs to be removed. We very naturally sway to an additive mindset — we will add something to a situation to solve the problem more often than removing something. But often times, a simpler and less resource exhaustive solution is just removing something. This, again, comes back to ego — are we too proud to say ‘this was wrong’? Or are we too eager to show off our design skills by making something new?
A great resource is the book Subtract by Leidy Klotz which explores this concept in a lot more detail.
Lesson 3: Who benefits, and who is harmed?
And the final takeaway is rooted in Principle 1: Design should give power to people and free them from systems that exploit or harm them. I want to share is a quick thought exercise that can be done as a consumer or as a creator to criticise the impact a design may have.
I came across this exercise in one of the Design Justice Network Zines which can be found on their website. It’s introduced as an activity to analyse design narratives. It challenges us to take a design context, assign characters or models to all individuals involved in the process, and assign them a position within the Venn diagram. It then becomes very clear who was involved in the process, who benefits from the design, and who was harmed.
Often times, characters can appear in both the benefited and harmed area of the Venn diagram — take for example, Facebooks own research which was leaked by their latest whistleblower. One leaked internal study cited 17% of teen girls who said Instagram, whose parent company is Facebook, makes eating disorders worse. So teen girls may placed in the benefit segment of the Venn diagram, for reasons such as connecting to their peers, but they are also harmed by instagram by way of increased body dysmorphia and body image issues.
When facing this dilemma, the ethics and values which we spoke about in the examples at the beginning of our talk are challenged and formed. These are the moments where inclusive and ethical design can happen. According to the whistleblower, Facebook prioritised weekly active usage over the mental wellbeing of young girls.
I’m going to ask you to indulge me for a moment, I’d like to finish with this. I spoke a bit about how we can tackle design challenges in a more inclusive way, and how we can challenge the designs that are around us. I told you how everything is designed, and how the pairing of influence and value signals makes design a powerful tool in our lives. And I told you that everything is designed for somebody, and that somebody needs to be considered.
But I want you to leave here seeing yourselves as designers too. Design is simply decision making that influences experience. And with the rise of technology, products and services are becoming much less designed and much more customised, depending on who uses it — and by that I mean you. So whether you like it or not, your engagement is designing experiences for you and for others. And that means you have the responsibility and the power to change that. It’s very convenient for companies to make design feel mysterious or inaccessible, but the reality is that if a design decision is made, it can be unmade, or it can be different.
And what a wonderful thing to know — that our world is designed, and that it is malleable, and that we have the power as designers to change it.
Thank you
