People Laughed During an Important Point At the “Design Disruptors” Screening
Last night I got the golden ticket (well silver) to see the premier of InVision’s “Design Disruptors” documentary. I sat with hundreds of other designers jam packed into Castro Theater and awaited the much hyped screening. Clark had been sending me email updates on the screening for weeks.
As a new designer I was looking forward to some behind the scenes looks at design teams working on very successful products. They didn’t disappoint. Among the featured were Google Ventures, Lyft, Facebook, Salesforce, AirBNB, Netflix, Dropbox, Etsy and Pinterest just to name a few.
There were some really insightful sound bites from John Maeda of KPCB and Jason Maden of Accel Partners. Julie Zhuo of Facebook talked user empathy and Margaret Lee of Google talked designing for people’s lives. We got to hear some interesting origin stories from Lyft and MailChimp* (hell ya Freddie High-Fives!) and ended on promoting diversity in design and designing for social capital. It gave me the feels and I think a lot of us left inspired to go out and change our world for the better through design.
However, as a new designer that is also a woman of color, I felt a little disheartened. When InVision released the first trailer for Design Disruptors the lack of diversity (particularly the lack of women and people of color) was glaring and it sparked a lot of discussion and critiques and rightfully so. When InVision released updated trailers this year, it seemed that they had taken the criticism and made conscious updates to the way they were representing the design community.
I walked into the theater optimistic and pleased to find that they discussed the importance of having people from different cultural backgrounds on a design team. I also loved that we got to see the awesome work that Maurice Woods is doing with the Inneract Project making design more accessible for kids in underrepresented communities but I don’t think the message sunk in.
During the film, John Maeda made a lovely point on the importance of being influenced by people who have different worldviews than your own. Loosely quoted it was
“If Picasso hadn’t gone to Africa would he have drawn the way he had?”
And people in the audience laughed. It wasn’t a joke. It was an excellent and well supported point. Yeah, maybe you can chalk it up to designers not knowing their art history but for me it was reflective of the way a lot of folks in the tech industry react to calls for diversity. When I speak to people in senior positions- folks with the keys to the hiring doors- about promoting diversity, for the most part, the reaction is tone deaf at worst and apathetic at best.
Here are some examples of conversations I’ve had:
Tech person1: “A lot of my supervisors have been women.”
Me: “Were any of them Black or Brown?”
Tech person1: “No but the point is they were women.”
Tech person2: “We’d love to hire more diversely but the talent’s not out there.”
Me: “Where are you looking?”
Tech person2: “Within our network mostly.”
Me: “If you don’t know them what makes you think looking within your network will help you find them?”
They are frustrating conversations to have because I know a lot of it comes from lack of empathy in an industry where employing empathy is a gold standard. So when John Maeda made his point and people laughed, I cringed.
It got worse. After the screening there was a QA session. A young Black woman in the audience asked in so many words, what were companies doing to promote the hire of people of color and members of the LGBTQ community in design aka the underrepresented communities. The response was cookie cutter. I didn’t record so I don’t have a direct quote but it involved some tap dancing and the typical “We value diversity” assertion followed by some anecdotal “I know how to design for Palo Alto but not India” but nothing concrete. Nothing meaningful. The status quo was maintained.
I can’t say that I expected the panelists to unveil a five point plan for diverse hiring but I’ve heard so many variations of the same response in variations of the same setting that it doesn’t fail to disappoint me. One of the panelists also sited the existence of Design Disruptors as a possible tool to promote diversity in design. To their credit InVision is offering private screenings of the doc with all proceeds going to an organization that promotes design education in under-served communities. That’s commendable. The documentary is commendable but interviewing a handful of people of color for a (fairly exclusive) documentary isn’t problem solved. It’s not even close.
So in the interest of being empathetic, let me level with you folks who haven’t quite figured out how to talk about diversity. It’s a sensitive topic that elicits a lot of emotions. It’s also daunting to talk about and puts you under intense scrutiny when you do talk about it so in many ways it’s easier to avoid the subject. Also, recruiting is hard work. It’s a time consuming and costly process. You just want the best person for the job. Also, you may truly wish to have more designers from varied backgrounds on your team but you have no clue where to start or how to even approach recruitment.
If this is you, let me encourage you to employ some outreach. Start asking questions. You’re a designer, you (should) know how to ask questions. Furthermore, it is ok to admit that you don’t have a good strategy for it. There is a wealth of information and resources. There are thought leaders. There are consultants. Ask the questions. Do the outreach. People will talk and it is your job to listen. If that’s too much work for you or not within the bounds of your hiring strategy then do us all a favor and stop getting on stage and saying that you value diversity.
It’s a process. Educating people is a process. Changing the status quo is a process but if we really want to present as an industry that values disruption, then what better place is there to start than disrupting the demographics of design teams? If you value empathy and designing for everyone, why not include people who don’t look like you or come from where you come from in the design process? If we want to design to address problems in the world then why not talk to people who may not have the same problems you have? If it’s an uncomfortable thought for you then now you know how I felt when John Maeda talked about the importance of diversity in design and people laughed.
*This is unrelated to the post but I thought I’d share because this is the first search result that came up when I Googled “MailChimp high five” and I thought it was hilarious.
