Digital Curb Cuts and Design Justice
“You can start by thinking about the people who really need it most and are the ones who are going to benefit the most. Then ultimately the solution is just a better solution for everybody.” — Nicole Bleuel, Google Creative Labs.
In Season 2 Episode 8 of The Move podcast, co-hosts Ceasar McDowell and Ayushi Roy interview Nicole Bleuel of Google Creative Labs. The three discuss the need for technological platforms and products to address the need of a more representative public, in addition to Nicole’s innovative work around technology accessibility.
The metaphor of “digital curb cuts” surfaces in the podcast as a means of illustrating how centering marginalized communities in digital platforms yields more innovative and widely applicable solutions. Curb cuts, which are small ramps to enable wheelchairs to climb up sidewalks, were introduced in the United States following advocacy on behalf of the disability community, and have since benefited many other groups and users, such as people with strollers and bikers.
Similarly, digital interventions such as live captioning center the needs of a group on the margins — such as those who are hearing impaired — but provide a collective benefit to their users. As Nicole notes, working together with those on the margins facilitates empathy and collaborative knowledge exchange. These are needed to design responsive and equitable products that enable inclusive participation in digital civic spaces.
From the position of Google, Nicole’s work reflects Eric Gordon’s idea about acknowledging the limitations and opportunities of enacting change in civic spaces by certain industries. Seeing technology as interdependent with people, institutions, and their environments provides a promising opportunity for technology workers to build products or platforms that can create a more equitable and accessible digital environments, even if this doesn’t amount to policy-level shifts.
Finding unique opportunities within different industries or sectors to enact change in civic life has been a theme of Season 2 of The Move podcast. Both David Wertheimer, former Director of Community Engagement for The Gates Foundation, and Monique Gibbs, Policy Innovation Specialist at MassHousing, emphasized the importance of individuals finding power and agency within their organizations in order to create a more inclusive, relationship-centered internal cultures, and to design solutions that center those on the margins.
Going back even further, the concept of Design Justice shared by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT and founder of the Design Justice Network, on the very first episode of The Move Podcast.Design justice, according to Sasha, focuses on the margins in any intervention. A design justice approach explicitly urges practitioners to focus on the “structures of oppression and marginalization that shape people’s life chances and access to resources, power, visibility, livelihood, and health outcomes” that often become embedded and reproduced in design.
Similarly, as digital and social platforms continue to serve as forums of civic life and conversation, it’s important to think critically about how and where they empower (or disempower) the participation of voices from the margins. Designers building tomorrow’s technological platforms and solutions should focus on identifying the embedded structures as a key feature of their design, so that these solutions strengthen participation from all walks of life.
