Designing the Designer

Full Transcript from Jesse James Garrett’s talk at Midwest UX 2017 Keynote

I gave the closing talk at Midwest UX a few years back in Columbus, and it’s been great to observe from afar this community grow and prosper, and it’s been really wonderful to come back and see what you guys have built together. It’s really, really great. The program has been fantastic, and I’m having a good time.

So this talk is called “Designing the Designer” and I’ll get to exactly what I mean by that in just a minute, but I want to start out just by talking about this question, because — it’s an important question. It’s always been an important question: “Why isn’t technology working better for users?” This is the question that is at the center of everything that we do as designers of technology products. And the various ways that people have answered this question over decades of work have shaped our patterns, our processes, our mindset, our predilections and prejudices, and all of the different ways that we answer this question add up to a body of thinking about how we approach what we do.

This question isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s also about imagining what’s possible. But it’s about imagining what’s possible within the bounds of a very specific set of constraints that we face as designers. The constraints of humans.

Human-centered

Our work originates in the need to bring an understanding of human context, human capabilities, human expectations and human outcomes into the decision-making process when we create technology. And this is why we call our work “human-centered design.” Because what I’m talking about here is not just being good at making stuff, but being good at making stuff for people. Human-centered design is the radical idea that we should treat people as people, unique individuals, with uniquely human lives, and not as objects, identical units to be pushed through the systems we create.

Human-centered design is about what it really means to put the human at the center of the creative process. To apply the lens of human experience and human outcomes to every decision that we make, large and small. And this talk, Designing the Designer, is really about what we bring as individuals to that creative process. The personal qualities and the traits that contribute to creating truly human-centered design.

What designer?

So I guess I should talk about where these ideas come from, and this is really drawn from my own experience. As was mentioned in the introduction, I co-founded a company called Adaptive Path in San Francisco back in 2001. We were the first user-experience consultancy at a time when user experience was a very nebulous and new idea to a lot of people. And so over the years, we had to do a lot of education. We had to do a lot to help people understand the nature of this work. We had a remarkable run of 13 years as an independent consultancy before we were acquired by Capital One in 2014. And over the course of that span of time, we were really, really fortunate to draw some tremendously talented people to our little boutique consultancy. And I have, over the years, learned so much from the designers at Adaptive Path, and from the various ways they approach creative problem solving — so this talk is an effort to synthesize what I’ve seen make them successful. Because they really are an extraordinary group of people. The people that I’ve had the chance to work with — aside from their time at Adaptive Path — they have founded start-ups, and gone on to lead teams at some of the biggest and most influential companies in the world, and put forward ideas that have shaped how other people approach this work.

I wrote a booked called the Elements of User Experience, which many of you probably have copies of on the shelf (and a few of you maybe have actually read). But what a lot of people don’t realize is that my book is only one of a bunch of books that have come out of Adaptive Path. These are the books that have been written by my coworkers over the years, with more still in the pipeline.

Of all of the things we’ve accomplished, what I’m proudest of is the remarkable teachers that that we’ve had a chance to work with and learn from. So this talk is really about them. I want to talk about the traits, the personal qualities that I think they bring to their work, that I have seen made them successful.

Some restrictions apply

Now not everybody has all of these qualities, and certainly not everybody has them in the same proportions. And even the best, most experienced designers have their good days and their bad days. Days when we are able to use our abilities to their fullest extent, and days where we just aren’t able to get there. So as I talk about this stuff, don’t get overwhelmed — don’t feel like, “Oh, I have to do all of this stuff every single day!” Just think of it as some suggestions for looking at what you bring to your practice, and ways in which you might grow.

The adjacent possible

A lot of design — and I think where the place where human creativity in design comes into play the most — is the process of exploration of what in the sciences they refer to as “the adjacent possible.” The adjacent possible is simply the range of answers that exist in any given moment to the question, “Where do we go from here?”

Here’s one example of that idea. In the game of chess, there’s a finite number of moves that a player can make at any given time based on the positions of the pieces on the board, and the rules, the constraints that dictate the movement of those pieces. This finite set of moves defines the adjacent possible set of game states at any moment in the game, the potential futures that are just one step removed from where we are now. The difference between a chess grand master and the rest of us is that the grand master understands the adjacent possible better than we do. They can see the moves that we see, but they see them in a completely different light because of their experience. Or, they may see things that we don’t. And it’s the same thing for designers as we explore the creative possibilities that exist within the constraints of systems, and technology, and what we know about the psychology and behavior of our users. At every point in the design process, there are ideas that are just one step away from the ideas that we’re currently working with. That’s our adjacent possible. It’s always changing as our understanding of the problem that we’re trying to solve continues to evolve, and the ideas that we choose to pursue along the way. Because design never happens in a straight line. It zigs, it zags, there are lateral jumps, and backtracks and dead ends.

Sometimes our adjacent possible expands as new possibilities come into view. And sometimes it contracts either because we’ve learned something new that takes certain possibilities off the table, or simply because every idea carries with it, implicitly, the rejection of ideas that are incompatible with it.

So much of our growth as designers entails growing our ability as individuals to broadly and deeply understand the adjacent possible throughout our design process. The more we can do this, the more likely we are to find truly innovative solutions. Creative possibilities that are just not visible to others. Dreams that no one has dreamed.

Day to day

I would argue that our access to the adjacent possible is not a matter of the tools and methods we use, but of the mindset and values that we bring to the creative process. The way that we broaden our access to the adjacent possible is something that happens day by day. What matters to these designers that I’ve worked with that I’ve been so inspired by is not your philosophy or school of design, or what school you went to for design. What matters is how you make choices from day to day throughout your creative process. Because frankly, if your creative process is going well, it’s going to throw a lot of choices at you. A lot of decisions to make for which the answers will not be obvious. So it’s about how you respond to those difficult choices, how you adapt as you move through your creative process — which, ideally, is always a process of discovery.

Open eyes

So for this process of discovery we have to come into it with open eyes. Some of these designers, when they get involved in the design problem, they soak up all of the information they can about the context of the problem to give them a deeper understanding of the nature of the problem. Some problems are as deeply rooted in decades-old market dynamics as they are in shifts in technology. These designers will try to learn a little bit about both. They’re always trying to take in as much information as they can about a problem. Always seeking a little more context, a little more detail. Not just about our users, or the market we’re trying to serve, but about the organizations that we work within. We’ll read articles about the people who lead these organizations in order to better understand their thinking. In some cases, it can be useful to read up on the founders of a company, to learn how their philosophies shaped the company’s culture, even though they may not have been part of the company for many years. When it comes to the human side of the design equation, going in with open eyes, means wanting to learn as much as you can about the people who use the design. Because without human awareness, we can never be truly human-centered.

This is why research is foundational to any human-centered design practice. Design without research is like trying too solve a jigsaw puzzle with your eyes closed. So we have to keep our eyes open.

Be curious

And this insistence on always knowing more I think speaks to a deeper trait in the designers that I’ve worked with. They are inherently curious people. These are people for whom every answer leads to more questions. They just always want to know more about systems, about organizations, about technology, but most of all, about people. Because how can you be human-centered if you aren’t curious about people? Our work requires us to constantly just wonder about our fellow human beings. Wonder about their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences. When our relationship with our users is one of curiosity, of genuinely wanting to understand them more deeply, that understanding will always inform every part of the design process, even if we aren’t talking about the users in that moment.

Going broad, going deep

That curiosity also manifests in the kinds of projects that people take on and the kinds of work that they pursue as designers. Going broad simply means being curious about lots of different kinds of things. It means taking on lots of different kinds of problems and working across a wised range of product categories and industries. Because you might not think that what you learn in one area can be applied elsewhere, but frequently it can. You can find connections between problems that on the surface can seem very different from one another. Because design solutions have broader application than the specific context in which they might have been created. And valuable insights can come from unlikely sources. So you can find yourself surprised when the answer to a problem for an insurance company is inspired by a previous project for a game company. Or when you recognize common elements between a health care website and a news website.

Going deep on the other hand, means immersing yourself in whatever problem you’re facing in the moment to allow it to become your world for a time. To carry it around with you, to kind of have it always running on the background. Because that background processing is what enables those kinds of lateral, intuitive leaps that lead to innovation.

Holistic

When we go deep like this, we can develop a holistic sense of the problem, and a holistic way of thinking about solutions to the problem. Experiences are complex. There’s a lot going on in any given human experience. And if we are doing our jobs well as designers of human experiences, we are orchestrating that experience across many different variables. We are appealing to our users senses, to their rational minds, to their irrational feelings, and doing all of it while balancing their tasks, their goals and their needs with the capabilities and constraints of the systems that we’re creating.

Experiences is so complex that it can’t be reduced to a set of definitive choices determined with scientific precision by our research. Research can inform our creative choices, but it can’t dictate them — experience is too messy for that. We don’t do research to inform the design, we do it to inform the designer. The designer must take in the problem from multiple points of view and synthesize a holistic understanding of the problem in order to create a holistic solution.

They think in terms of systems, design systems, visual systems, interface systems, all layered together, working together toward a cohesive goal.

Connected

Part of thinking systemically is recognizing that each of us, designers and users alike, are embedded in the larger system that we call humanity. The work that we do is not done by a lone genius slaving away in the workshop, the way a painter or a composer, or a mathematician might work. Being human-centered means broadening our perspective beyond ourselves an our own experiences. It means seeking out input from those we know see things differently because that’s how we stretch, that’s how we learn, that’s how we grow. So we stay connected to the larger world, always placing our work in the larger context of what we collectively know about people, and technology, and society, and how all of these things influence the experiences that we have.

Always learning, always teaching

I mentioned that I was really proud of the number of teachers we attracted to adaptive path over a number of years because I think this part is really important. If we teach what we learn along the way, it requires us to reflect on it. To think about what really matters. To think about, what are the essential patterns in the work that we do, (what are) the ideas or values underlying our choices? Whenever we have to communicate those things, it forces us to look inward, and that inward looking tells us where we need to go next in our own creative journeys.

Open minded

Figuring out where to go next requires having an open mind. My friend, Adaptive Path co-founder Peter Merholz, once described his philosophy to me as, “Strong opinions weakly held,” and I have to confess it took me a long time to really understand what he meant by that. But by working alongside him over the years, I realized that at any moment in his creative process, he always had a point of view on the next step to take, the best direction to take the design. But at any point in that process, if some new information came along that changed his understanding of the problem, he would be totally ready to drop his best idea and start over — even if starting over meant that he didn’t have an idea.

So in all of our work, as our understanding of the problems that we’re working on changes and evolves, we have to be willing to let go of ideas that we’ve been working with and accept that they no longer fit. Sometimes that means admitting to ourselves that we didn’t understand the problem as well as we thought we did. And sometimes that means admitting that we made mistakes along the way in our design process. So we have to be able to move beyond our own egos which get in the way of letting go of things that are no longer working for us.

Our willingness to change our minds makes our ideas flexible, makes our ideas adaptable to new and changing contexts. If we don’t take in that flexibility as a part of our process, we come out of it with ideas that are brittle, that break down when the context shifts. One way we can avoid this brittleness is by resisting the impulse to subscribe to a single methodology for all design problems. To remain flexible, we must curate for ourselves a toolkit of design practices. A variety of methods, and the knowledge of when each method is best applied. There is no one true way to do this work.

We select the best tools for the job, rather than trying to shape each job to the tools that we have. Put down the computer, and pick up a pen. Put down the pen, and start telling a story. Whatever it takes.

Having more than one way to think about a problem gives us more than one way to see possible solutions, expanding our access to the adjacent possible. So like a tree whose branches bend in strong wind, we can bend instead of breaking, and weather the storms of organizational, technological and economic change.

Willing to question

Being flexible in response to changing conditions is great but it’s hard to get there if we aren’t willing to enforce that flexibility on ourselves. We have to have the willingness to ask questions, and the un-willingness to rest in our assumptions, to rest in our past experiences, in deciding what is true and correct in THIS case, in THIS moment. Being willing to question means being willing to challenge your own ideas. It means admitting that your solution could be flawed. This is where moving past our egos attachment to our work is critical.

Questioning your own ideas also invites others into dialogue. If you show you are willing to subject your own ideas to open, honest inquiry, people will engage in the process of inquiry with you. They’ll help you challenge your ideas, they’ll help you make your ideas better. And hopefully, they’ll invite you to challenge their ideas too.

We also have to be willing to question ourselves in other ways. To question our best practices, our proven methodologies, our universals that apply to every design problem. Staying open minded and continuing to question HOW we do the work enables us as individuals and as a field to continue to grow.

We also have to be willing to question, not just ourselves, but the people and the systems that shape how we do our work, to ensure that we can be successful in being human-centered. This is about looking at the environments that we work in, because design work is always situated in the context of the human organizations and human and technological systems that must ultimately deliver the experiences that we envision. So we must be realistic about the readiness of those systems to deliver experience in a truly human-centered way. If those systems can evolve, we must support and guide that evolution, and if they can’t, we either learn to work within those constraints, or find some new constraints to move on to. But we can’t understand our constraints if we aren’t willing to question.

A capacity for discomfort

Now all of this questioning, questioning of ourselves, questioning of our collaborators and our partners, can be a deeply uncomfortable process, and in fact there’s a lot about design that’s uncomfortable (if you’re doing it right). Because exploring new ideas means, by definition, we’re operating outside the bounds of what we have always done and known. It can be a scary feeling. And sometimes we feel like we’re lost in the woods, wondering if we’ll ever find our way out. We have to be okay with that. We have to be comfortable with that uncertainty. As much as we might always want more context and more information and more data, and more insight, we also have to cultivate being comfortable with not having all the answers. As much as the design process involves making judgements, it is also, at times, about suspending judgement. And suspending judgement can be hard, because we feel pressure to push toward conclusion, resolution, definition, and in part it’s — that discomfort is because it means acknowledging that we may not know which way to go just yet.

Another kind of discomfort uh that comes up is when we are designing for people who are very different from us — the uncertainty that is introduced when we have to bridge the gap between our own experience and the experience of other people. It can be uncomfortable because it requires us to really acknowledge how different we can be from one another.

Talk about failure

One of the most uncomfortable things we can face as designers are those moments where the work that we’ve done simply missed the mark. We drew the wrong conclusion, we gathered the wrong data, we prioritized the wrong things — we got it wrong. And inside, there might be some part of us that might think that that makes us wrong, as people, as designers. Makes us “not good enough.” But if we can rise above that voice of shame, and own the faulty premises, the bad judgements, the unsatisfactory outcomes, we can better understand why they were faulty, or bad, or unsatisfactory. If we don’t get caught up in what we think those outcomes might mean about us as creative professionals, we can make different choices next time.

Awesome weirdos

And making different choices is a thing that designers like to do. The stereotype is real. Designers — they have their quirks. They can be unapologetic enthusiasts for the obscure, and the unconventional and the offbeat. Sometimes these quirks show up in little subtle ways, like having a particular favorite kind of pencil, or a taste for some particular subgenre of art or music. And sometimes those quirks can show up in larger ways, in patterns that define how we live and work, like — I don’t know, always wearing the same color clothes.

What these choices illustrate is a willingness to venture outside norms, and express who we are in the world, express our preferences, and embracing the ways in which — the things that work for us aren’t necessarily the things that work for everyone. Owning those choices as being right for us, regardless of what other people do.

Embodiment

Some of these designers that I’ve worked with over the years bring a real sense of embodiment to their work. You know, we tend to think of this as being — you know, it’s intellectual work, and it’s creative work, and it’s all happening, sort of, above-the-neck. But embodiment plays a really important role in creative processes.

There’s an entire scientific field called “embodied cognition” which studies the way that our thinking and our creativity are influenced by the way that we engage physically with the world. As we think through problems, we do exercises that involve getting up out of your desk, and away from your desk and moving around and physically manipulating objects — or simply going for a walk. By changing the way our bodies relate to our environments from moment to moment, we access cognitive resources and problem solving capabilities that we can’t get to any other way.

This manifests in the creative process in a couple of different ways. In the realm of creative problem solving, designers tend to be visual thinkers. For a lot of people who come in to design, it’s because they have a strong visual sensibility that they become interested in the field in the first place. And so we create visual artifacts, like slide shows, and presentation decks, and mockups and things like that, models of all kinds, in order to play with ideas, to give them shape and color, allowing us to manipulate and transform them in our mind’s eye. But by moving beyond the simply visual — by creating and working with physical artifacts — we can engage not just the visual systems in our brains, but the motor sensory system as well, literally feeling our way through the problem even if we are still working at the level of abstract ideas.

A second way embodiment manifests in the creative process is when we simply change up our stimuli: standing instead of sitting, walking around the block, coming to a conference like this one instead of spending all of our time in our offices. When we change our stimuli, we change our thinking, which changes our access to the adjacent possible — and sometimes allows us to find solutions that would otherwise elude us.

Self-aware

In order to be embodied, we have to be present with ourselves, aware of what’s going on with ourselves from moment to moment. Physical self-awareness can range from simply knowing when it’s time to turn up the heat in the room to knowing when it’s time for a bathroom break. If we’re present with our physical states, we can become more aware of what we physically need in order to do our best work. Some of us, we know that our peak creative time is first thing in the morning after a bagel and coffee. And for some of us, it’s in the sort of the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is out, and we’ve been able to do some work and get some momentum going. (I am regrettably struck with the life-long pattern of late night creative inspiration, which doesn’t serve my sleep cycles well…)

But if you know what works for you, what works for your body, you can create patterns in your creative life and in your creative processes that are optimized for you. If we aren’t paying attention to the body, then we also aren’t paying attention to the cues that the body gives us in the creative process when ideas resonate with us.

Instinctive

Here I’m talking about the development of creative instinct, tuning into intuition, the responses that come from our unconscious mind that are transmitted to us through bodily sensation. The unconscious works more quickly than the conscious mind. It can process input and respond to it in a fraction of the time it takes the conscious mind to respond.

We receive these messages from the unconscious mind through felt sensations in our bodies: butterflies in your stomach, your heart skipping a beat, a shiver down your spine. There are all these subtle things, ways in which our unconscious is trying to give us clues as to something that has been a reaction to something that has been processed, something that has been going on in the moment. In the creative process there’s this real sense of energy when you start moving toward a solution that feels right to everyone in the room, and it’s an energy we can feel in our bodies if we can stay connected to it.

So if we can bring a sense of connection to intuition into the process of, for example, design critique, we can notice how we respond — and like — do I start to get fidgety in my chair as you’re talking about an idea? Are people leaning in? Am I feeling myself sort of… physically withdrawing? All of these things are clues that tell us what is resonating about an idea for us.

Inevitably, when we get to the end of that process, we can always backtrack and fill in with a rational explanation for why the design works, but if we listen to those things that our bodies are telling us feel like the right ideas, we can make more of those intuitive leaps, and broaden (again) our access to the adjacent possible.

Spirit of play

This process of exploration requires of us a spirit of play. It means being open to flow and the dynamic moment-to-moment opportunities that arise, and following those opportunities as they open up. Figuring out whichever one is the one that feels most promising, that seems to have the richest potential.

So we had the improv performance last night, at this event, and improv is one area where this stuff really comes into play. In improv, every player on the stage is contributing to the dynamic evolution of the scene from moment to moment. This can only be sustained, it can only be successful if players are making choices that broaden the set of possibilities available to the entire group. They are extending the creative space for the process. And there’s an element of every creative process that is about maximizing available possibilities.

A spirit of play also requires us to open ourselves to possibilities that are impractical, impossible, science fiction, absurd. By keeping ourselves open to ridiculous possibilities, we prevent ourselves from developing unconscious filters, developing these internal editors and sensors that declare certain ideas to be unacceptable, to declare certain ideas to be off-limits. Those sensors restrict our access to the adjacent possible. So it takes conscious effort to stay in a spirit of play.

Plays well in groups

That spirit of play is also, I think, really important in inviting other people into your creative process because other people bring diverse ways of thinking, different perspectives informed by their own experiences. This requires us to figure out how to work with people who think really differently from we do — from how we work. It requires us to develop approaches to collaboration and communication that allow for the free flow of creative ideas, even if those ideas are coming from really different places.

Leading a design team requires acknowledging that there is no one way to do design, and that each member of the team can approach it from their own unique strengths. And creative leadership means finding ways to leverage those strengths, and integrate them into a single creative process. It means noticing the way that divergent thinking plays out on your teams and finding ways to balance and blend complementary approaches.

Storytelling

Playing well with others also means having a range of different ways of communicating ideas. This is especially important during those phases of the design process where our ideas are kind of vague and unformed. Finding the best way to communicate an idea to the specific people we’re collaborating with — whether that’s writing and email or drawing on a white board, or simply talking something through — helps bring those people into our process earlier, bringing them along for the ride, where they can help us evaluate and validate ideas before they become maturely developed.

No matter where we are in the design process, we have to be good at telling stories. Sometimes we tell pictures to tell stories, sometimes we use words, but when we can find the narrative that gets at the essence of an experience, it becomes both an effective communications tool, and an effective way to organize our ideas about the design.

Open heart

Being human-centered challenges us to deeply open ourselves to other peoples emotional experiences. It requires us to engage with others as emotional beings, and reconcile ourselves to the impact that our creative choices have on their emotional lives. So we’ve been hearing a lot lately, including at this event about the role of empathy in this work. And empathy is vital. We must have an awareness of what other people are feeling that goes beyond simply understanding what they are trying to accomplish.

But I believe our work requires something more than simple empathy. It requires compassion. It requires compassion for the myriad emotional pressures our users feel every day that are completely beyond our control as designers. It requires compassion for people who make different choices than we make, who come from different life experiences than ours, and who see the world differently from us.

Empathy is not enough because empathy only tells us about other people. What we do in response to that is up to us. And the choice we must make is to be compassionate towards our users. There’s a word for someone who understands other people’s feelings but does not respond with compassion. We call them sociopaths. So we must be open-hearted.

Meaning and purpose

I have been fortunate to work with many people who are motivated to do this work by something deep inside themselves, and I feel like every time I come to a conference like this and talk with people, they don’t do it because they can make a lot of money, they don’t do it to become famous, get on stages like this one — they do it because they find meaning in it. When there is a sense of meaning to our work, it guides our choices. It gives us purpose, a role that we play in the world — not a mission, not a finite objective to be achieved, but a state of being that we continually live. And that state of being, I think quite honestly, is the state of being in love.

Being in love

Yeah, we want to reduce the incidents of user error out there in the world, but we also want to acknowledge that users are going to make errors. Machine-like perfection is not the point. Systems that acknowledge the impossibility of machine-like perfection are the point.

So first you have to be in love with people. To honor them in your design choices, no matter how irrational they are, or how many times they overlook your carefully laid out interaction cues — but beyond that, you have to be in love with the world, in love with design, and all the incredible possibilities we can make real through the processes of creative problem solving. In love with experience, and the rich array of ways that we can shape experiences for one another, and in love with the vibrant diversity and complexity in our world that allows for such richness.

They cultivate themselves

The best designers that I’ve worked with are people who have cultivate themselves. In many cases the designers that I have known have grown into these qualities over time. I’ve watched them develop them by cultivating them, feeding them. I see how they feed themselves as creative people, with new information, new ways of thinking, new ways of doing the work they do. They’re invested in their own growth, but not simply from the perspective of professional development. They invest in their own growth as human beings, in many ways that have nothing to do with design. They have creative projects, pursuits beyond design that they invest their time and energy in because these pursuits enable them to experiment. To use different muscles, or find meaning that they can’t get elsewhere. They have passions, things that fill them up as people: music and art, and theater, things that enrich us and deepen and diversify the range of experiences we empathize with and can draw on in our work. These are the things that make us more human-centered.

So maybe being human-centered isn’t simply about centering our design process around other humans. Maybe it’s about being centered in our own humanity. By cultivating our own humanity, we cultivate our ability to connect to others. In other words, maybe what makes us more human-centered is also makes us more human. Accepting our faults, but also accepting and embracing our infinite capacity to synthesize information, ask new questions, make judgements, take chances, and follow threads into new possibility spaces. Because we need these capabilities more than ever in this moment. Because as technology has evolved, and our practice has evolved, this question has evolved too.

“Why isn’t technology working better for users?”

Because the question before us now is not just a question about users. It is a question about something much larger. It’s a version of the question we’ve been asking all along, but now it’s a question that many others are asking too, with good reason.

“Why isn’t technology working better for humanity?”

Because our technologies are becoming entwined in the fabric of our society in new and ever-more potent ways. We are inviting more and more and more technology into our lives, and allowing more and more and more of our daily experiences to be shaped by technology and the choices that the people who create technology — the people in this room — make. Thinking about individual humans and individual human experiences is no longer enough.

The nature of technology’s influence on our lives has shifted. The issues may look the same on the surface, but the difference is that an ill-considered dialogue box or webform didn’t used to have the power to enable abusive behavior at scale. It didn’t used to have the power to undermine civic discourse. It didn’t use to have the power to unravel social fabric.

We, as designers, have always been the voice of human impact in the decision-making process as we create technology. That voice has never needed to be heard more loudly and more consistently than right now. We need to be the ones initiating conversations about the potential of our work to make people’s lives worse instead of better, even if we are hitting our business targets, even if we are hitting our behavioral metrics. We need to be the ones initiating conversations about unintended consequences, the bugs in our systems that can lead to damaging second order effects. We need to be the ones initiating conversations about how our choices create outcomes for humanity as a whole and not just for each individual in isolation. Because we’re not in isolation. We are all in this together, and we have a moral imperative to be more human-centered in everything that we do.

This is the mindset and the perspective that we as designers must nurture, and cultivate, and uphold, and defend. Because there is no one else with a seat at that table — not product people, not technologists, not business analysts or brand marketers — who has the — “Doing the right thing for humanity” as their explicit mandate. It is up to us.

I don’t know how we get there yet. But I do know that we’re going to need a lot of people with the qualities that I’ve described for you today to make it happen. And I hope that this talk has given you some ways to see the gifts that you can bring, and perhaps the untapped potential that still resides within you that can help you contribute to this work that is so vital to the future of our species, and our planet.

Thank you all very much.