Inclusive by design. The Metaverse that could be.
Abbie Walsh, Managing Director and Head of Design, Strategy, and Growth at Accenture Interactive in London, UK. The content below is from our interview with her on our series exploring Diversity in the Metaverse, within Accenture Interactive.
The Metaverse is going to be huge.
The promise of a parallel and yet integrated space where people, media, entertainment, games, business, and technology come together to create an alternative universe sounds too good to be true.
Only it’s true.
Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft already attract millions of people to their worlds. The intriguing cryptocurrencies market is already valued at $1.49 billion. The decentralization movement is inspiring a next-generation web, new markets, and new organizational structures.
But as of now, the Metaverse is still under construction, and just like it happened with the internet, we are 15 to 20 years away from realizing its full potential.
We talked to Abbie Walsh, Head of Design, Strategy, and Growth at Accenture Interactive, and she believes that the immaturity of the Metaverse is exactly the most exciting thing about it. Essentially, it is still in its design phase, and for designers like Abbie and everyone working across Interactive, that means we have the opportunity and responsibility to question assumptions.
“The goal should be to make the Metaverse more accessible to more people and then it will evolve faster into being something that’s valuable for more people. The more people use it, the more interesting it will become.” Abbie says as we discuss what she believes is important for the design of the Metaverse.
But… Who is building the Metaverse?
The overwhelming presence of males in the tech industry has been well documented. Most technologists, creators, and developers tend to be males, specifically white (55%) and Asian (20%) while women represent roughly only 20% of the people working in tech.
The Metaverse should attract a more diverse group of creators, and players if it is to cross the chasm into mass adoption by audiences.
Abbie believes that this is the perfect time to break away from old paradigms:
“I’m a gay woman and I’m in my 40s now. Growing up gay in the 70s and 80s when it wasn’t quite so cool to be gay obviously comes with a lived experience that I bring to my thinking.
That’s why I’m questioning a lot of our accepted norms and I’m very curious about what’s happening now in the world, particularly with underrepresented groups who are genuinely exploding into new markets post covid.
“If we at Interactive are genuinely going to be leaders in the Metaverse, we need to start from a place where we’re designing for all and with all. The world is showing us what is possible when you take into account loads of people’s different lived experiences. Women and underrepresented groups can share perspectives and angles that we just wouldn’t be able to think about otherwise. So, imagine how much better, safer and more democratized the Metaverse will be with all those viewpoints and experiences shaping it.
We have got to take a stance on that because I don’t think it will happen on its own. As we know the startup world is male-dominated, the tech world is male-dominated and the Metaverse will also be male-dominated if we don’t design it differently from the start.
So if we don’t over-index and force ourselves, we will find ourselves being dragged into that position just because that’s the kind of status quo, but I think it’s a huge opportunity to get it right.”
We discussed a famous quote around inclusion in the metaverse:“ The more homogenized you make your ‘verse, the less ‘meta’ it becomes.” Jace Hall; and Abbie agree, “if you exclude chunks of society from the metaverse. Because then the opportunity for the Metaverse starts to become a little less exciting as it quickly becomes very narrow and it would be hard to rectify that.
We need people from ethnic minorities and people with disabilities in the room because you can’t speak on behalf of their lived experience and what that has meant for people.
Diversity and Inclusion by Design
“We know through design that there are methodologies that we can use to try and avoid that. It’s not just about trying to rectify afterward, it’s about designing it from the very beginning, and that has got to be about diverse teams that are creating the experiences in the Metaverse.
If you’re a designer and you currently do service design or interaction design, you need to be able to extend that into much more. It’s almost existential, you need to be able to think about it from lots of different perspectives, which designers are naturally good at.”
Abbie’s question to solve comes down to this: How can we design an entry point experience where we are not compromising our new identity based on old paradigms?
It takes a well-trained village.
Designing and creating Metaverse services and products is going to require a transformation similar to the digital transformation of the last 15 years.
For Abbie is all about people: “people need to be engaged in a way that they feel matters to them. So, there has to be a purpose, it’s not just transforming around the metaphors for the sake of it, there needs to be a purpose that ties to what they, as an organization, believe in and what their brand values are, and also what their customers think that they stand for.”
For a lot of people, Metaverse is way outside of their comfort zone, just like digital still is — so you can imagine that organizations that aren’t fully digital yet will have to invest a lot in learning and up-skilling.
It’s important to give people the opportunity to grow and not be naive about that otherwise there might be some who won’t engage in it.
The reason I love the Rogue Bees so much is that I am personally very passionate about not being blinded to our own self-perpetuating beliefs. And the Metaverse is a great opportunity to shake and rebalance some of our legacy beliefs!
Follow Abbie on Linkedin.
