Mismatch Notes
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
By Kat Holmes
Chapter 1
- Mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion
- “An inclusive environment is far more than the shape of its doors, chairs, and rampways. It also considers the psychological and emotional impact on people.”
- “Accessibility, sociology, and civil rights weren’t required curricula for learning how to build technology.”
Three Fears of Inclusion
- Inclusion isn’t nice
A fear of using the wrong words, and offending people, must be worked through. Many organizations can use the right words but really not mean it or care to implement any change. Develop a shared language to support inclusion. - Inclusion is imperfect
You can’t design a solution for absolutely everyone. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying. - Inclusion is ongoing
No solution is perfect. Every solution needs care and maintenance over time, and the field of inclusion itself is developing and in search of a better vocabulary.
Most inspiring overall idea to me:
Each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we open an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways. This, in turn, changes who can participate in building our world.
This particularly resonates with the Gates’ message about education in their 2020 annual letter. I want to make it a priority of mine to connect as many people as possible with information and opportunities to learn and grow.
Recognize exclusion & learn from diversity & solve for one, extend to many
Chapter 2
- You can’t say “you can’t play” — those in power, and those who like control, object to this rule, but it has incredibly positive impacts on those that are repeatedly excluded. And the negatives realized by the objectors can often be counteracted by the contributions added by those newly included.
- “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” The solutions we produce change society and all future solutions must reflect the previous solutions that have shaped society.
Chapter 3
- People who have experienced forms of exclusion will be able to contribute these experiences to the design process. Teams without people who have been excluded in certain ways are likely to exclude future users in those same ways.
Two Side Effects of Exclusion
- Social invisibility
Because of the in-out dichotomy, people who are consistently “out” can be forgotten in society. When entire categories of people have their needs ignored consistently, other people forget about them again in the future, and this cycle reinforces stereotypes and further isolates these people from society. - Pain of rejection
Studies show that social rejection approximates the same effect as physical pain in the body. Rejection can also manifest emotionally, through sadness or anger.
- Something I didn’t know about curb cuts — they often have different textures to indicate what type of street they lead into
- “Every human interaction that includes technology gains a wild card: who will it reject and who will it accept?”
- “Every day, design teams make incorrect assumptions about people.”
- Every designer must be conscious of why they design solutions — it starts with leadership making inclusion part of an organization’s culture
Chapter 4
- “We first met when Porter was a design intern at Microsoft. He was working on his PhD while teaching at the University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering program.” Nice.
- The game design industry has historically been dominated by people assuming that every user will be exactly like they are in that present moment. I wonder if this even applies to designers imagining players will play the game exactly like they would. (It seems like this is the implication).
- Open-source tools allow more people to contribute to a variety of areas in which they have been implemented
Three skills of successful inclusive designers
- Identify ability biases and mismatched interactions between people and world.
Ensure that teams have designers with a diverse range of experiences. Ensure that the culture of a team or organization supports inclusive design. Avoid ability bias, using your own ability level as a baseline for designing something. Disability = mismatched human interactions, not a personal health condition. - Create a diversity of ways to participate in an experience
Design multiple options for doing the same thing, or for doing similar things, so that there are many ways to experience the design. Challenges include lack of design education dedicated to inclusion, a complex legally-derived lexicon, and a lack of modernization in the technologies that can enable accessible practice in the design process, e.g. conducting usability testing in person with paper while technology speeds ahead. - Design for interdependence and bring complementary skills together.
America has the damaging ideal of a lone wolf, someone who makes it on their own, due to their own abilities. Teams should be interdependent rather than independent, and it’s perfectly okay for people to depend on assistive artifacts. Design ways for people to collaborate with each other.
- Accessibility is an attribute of a design — inclusive design is a method (although I imagine inclusion is also an attribute of a design).
- “Most accessibility criteria grew out of policies and laws that were designed to ensure barrier-free access for specific disability communities.” (Wheelchair access is actually incredibly recent, the result of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, of 1990)
- “Inclusive design should always start with a solid understanding of accessibility fundamentals.”
- Universal design = framework aimed at designing a single, fixed product that has the widest range of use cases possible. Particularly applies to physical attributes, in fields like architecture and environmental design.
Chapter 5
- Interesting & sad anecdote about architectural + urban planning exclusion in Detroit — demolishing housing projects for “urban renewal”, disproportionately excluding African-Americans from city spaces
- The point of the anecdote is that the housing (Brewster-Douglass) was built by a different group than it was built for, which led to a failure in supporting the group it was intended to help
- “Nothing about us, without us”
These types of considerations are something I have to think hard about to understand how I can best serve inclusion as a designer. I am white, male, had an uneventful upper-middle class upbringing, and have not been excluded by virtually any design I’ve ever encountered. With this in mind, how can I best contribute to inclusion on a design team? I know I must get others involved, people who have had different experiences than me and can see things in a way that I never can. As of right now, I’m not sure how to implement these ideas, but I know this is something I have to carry with me as I move forward.
Chapter 6
- Many design attempts, though ostensibly well-intentioned, can fail through subconscious adoption of an “us vs. them” mentality
- One group of designers is designing for another group of people, but none of the designers is in that group. They tend to rely on stereotypes of that group to design their product, and this is problematic
- Building a community of “exclusion experts” — people who you expect to be most disadvantaged by your product. Asking for their expertise and opinions on features and changes is the best way to ensure that your design is inclusive to the groups these experts belong to.
- It is vital to understand how potential changes to your product will affect different users in different ways, particularly on an emotional level, but also on a functional one.
Again, design WITH, not FOR, and don’t presume that professional background should count for more than the opinions of real users of your design.
Chapter 7
Impact of mathematical models on design & technology
- Normal (Gaussian) distribution & Pareto principle (80/20 rule)
- “mathematical models are a cornerstone of technology design”
- However, the field has been hurt by negative applications, like Adolphe Quetelet’s insistence on the perfectly normal person & the over-generalization of the Pareto principle to everything, which leads to faulty assumption
There is an assumption that designing for inclusion is like reaching the tiny area underneath the edges of the normal distribution — in reality, many solutions designed for different groups of people actually have benefits for everyone
- Big data cannot stand alone — it must be supplemented with qualitative data to be truly valuable (note: my generation assigns a different connotative meaning to “thick” than the industry does, and while I have heard of “thick data” in an anthropologist’s TED talk before, I anticipate that this term will have to be reworked over time)
- Friendly reminder that lowercase deaf refers to the inability to hear, while capital D Deaf refers to the community of deaf people
- Persona spectra are one-size-fits-one, inclusive solutions. However, still be sure to include exclusion experts whenever possible, especially when designing for personas that may not be approximated by anyone on the design team
- For personas, “it’s important to understand what motivates a person to use a solution.” Understanding the motivation allows the creation of persona spectra, extending to other personas that are all grounded in the same goal
Not everyone is an anthropologist. We aren’t all mathematicians. Not everyone is great at putting aside their cultural preconceptions. But we can all learn how to seek out excluded perspectives and let them supersede our own.
Chapter 8
The chapter begins with a number of anecdotes reinforcing something I took note of above somewhere — many designs that start with inclusion actually become effective at serving purposes even for people with different ability levels, sometimes in ways that weren’t anticipated. The last part of the chapter presents the necessary arguments to get these ideas through other non-design teams in a company.
Building a Business Justification for Inclusion
- Customer engagement and contribution
Half is about presenting the existing hacks that disadvantaged users have created for your product and explaining how a new design can improve their experience. Half is about engaging customers in the design process itself, which can have a profound impact on their product loyalty. - Growing a larger customer base
Including communities that were previously excluded — can be presented convincingly through persona spectra - Innovation and differentiation
Many companies have scores of ideas that they generated but never implemented in the market — introducing inclusion-driven problems can often lead to ways to utilize this untapped potential. Also, expanding design teams to include members with different ability biases helps ideation overall by creating a more diverse background across all metrics, not just ability. - Avoiding the high cost of retrofitting inclusion
Products that go to market without being accessible can incur costs in terms of customer support, lost customers, or even lawsuits. Considering inclusion from the start can minimize these costs by addressing them proactively rather than reactively.
Chapter 9
Inclusion can be argued for in terms of its business or professional benefits, but what really matters is the collective future shared by all of us.
“Some designers will make choices that reach millions of people and will endure for many years. If nothing else, I hope this book illustrates the weight of that privilege and opportunity.”
In the near future, machine learning and its applications to massive amounts of data will have to be guided to ensure that they don’t generalize all people as the same, and possibly to allow them to consider individuals differently (with the potential drawback of causing the Singularity).
World Economic Forum (WEF)’s top job skills in the future are all about adapting to uncertainty — critical thinking, complex problem solving, coordinating with others, etc. Particularly true under the assumption that many types of work will be automated.
Final note
Recognize exclusion → learn from diversity → solve for one, extend to many.
I read this book over a handful of days, and I can safely say already that it was one of those books that has made a profound impact on me. Not every book hits every person the same way, but I believe this to be in the category of most valuable/insightful books I’ve read in recent memory, and I hope to hold the information I learned close to heart moving forward.
