Keynote at the CIBC XX Design Challenge

Editor's Notes

• #2: Georgia Woods mentioned she does most of the purchasing in her household and we chuckled… why did we do that? I just went shopping yesterday. My mom and dad were visiting – who did I go shopping with? What were we shopping for? Why do you know or why don’t you know? Serena Williams -- doesn’t fit our image of a woman in tennis; she gets tested for drugs more than any other woman on the tour – is it related to the size of her muscles and strength? Tonya Harding also didn’t – she was poor, white, and rough – she turned to boxing. Did we put her in that box? Barnacles – think of 2 things that stick with you
• #3: Looking for direction: know we want to do things differently know we want to improve (to improve evermore you don’t need a process, you need a mindset) what we’re thinking but not saying, what we mean to do, what we hope to change Focus on gender bias in everyday life – how it creeps into society w/o us realizing it… - Marketing - Guys climb mountains; women go shopping - Coding and development - Design - Research
• #4: Time magazine called this “everyday sexism” in 2015. Why not adjust the facilities to the audience? Conferences with mostly women; also, why not make restrooms about the equipment inside and not about the individual coming in. What about the counter in some shops – in banks – a pwd couldn’t work there or comfortably be a customer there Everyday ableism Everyday racism
• #5: Innovation or essentialism? Women who garden are badasses – they are participating in one of the most brutal, destructive activities you can undertake in your yard! These women might have nails, but they are more focused on eradicating aphids and invasive species than they are manicures. Family, culture,
• #6: Men on Mars eat chips louder than Women on Venus They didn’t change the colours – that’s often what happens with products marketed to women
• #7: Conflation of two things that folks who take any women’s studies courses get disentangled immediately – sex vs. gender There are plenty of women who are feminine – and there are plenty that are masculine Who uses these pens? I wouldn’t, Georgia Woods? Angela Merkle? Christine LeGarde (managing director of the IMF)? My mom? I use pens that come in exactly these colours but they are gel pens marketed to designers – they look and feel like design tools, I can choose the 0.5mm which is VERY important to me. And they are the same pens my male colleagues use.
• #8: What about the counter in some shops – in banks – a person with disabilities couldn’t work there or comfortably be a customer there
• #9: We may say we aren’t political, we aren’t an activist and those things can all be true. What is also true is that nothing we do or say is neutral. It is embedded in our experiences and our context. We make choices (and I’ll call them design choices) all the time. How our living room is arranged, the settings on our seat in the car (manufacturers understood that we needed to save pre-settings — 2 of them) Mom and Dad drive — what about when their child gets a driver’s license? Or when their extended family shares a car? Whose family looks like that?
• #10: How do you ask the question: What do women want – who are the women you’re talking about? What do seniors want – which seniors?? What do people with disabilities want – how are you defining disability? Are you setting yourself up for failure from the beginning because of the way you’re asking the question? I’ve found it liberating to do the opposite of what comes natural or first to mind or easily… Ask, how can I make this experience suck for people? And then ask, am I doing any of that?
• #12: This is a good start but isn’t in-and-of-itself going to solve the problem. What would this look like? We’d be curious instead of assuming, we’d wonder instead of knowing, we’d ask more than we assume. For many of us it would require such an unsettling, personal questioning that we would find ourselves paralysed in our own uncertainty. If you wonder about everything you walk “with your head in the clouds” – this is what we say. Our society and culture values decisiveness, clarity, simplicity. Biases do something for us. They make the world simpler. They make us doubt ourselves less. They make us feel certain and complete and comfy.
• #13: This is all of us. We are lazy. We take the quick fix. Feel uncomfortable or anxious, take a pill. Have conflict, avoid it. Don’t know something, don’t admit it. We are taught these ways of approaching problems. When I present you with a problem, what is the first thing you do? Solve it.
• #14: These leaders are an increasingly rare breed. Vala Afshar is the Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce
• #15: Woah, Jess, I’m feeling queasy – what on Earth are we doing now? What you’re saying makes so much sense. But I’m feeling uncertain, uneasy, unsettled… Yes, stay there!
• #16: We start this way – with a model for how to do things. Start with a model an follow it A model, a framework, a how-to, a direction, a set rubric – give me structure!
• #17: Then we follow the steps, responding to each How do projects ever fail?How do we ever fail to achieve the results we hope to? How are we not catching the failures If this is such a perfect path to success, why does it ever fail?
• #18: When we let go of notion of clarity, we see differently.
• #19: To change the way we do things we need to look at how we think, how we feel, and how we do things… This is often the starting place for design and design thinking and inclusive design thinking
• #20: Think
• #21: It makes us comfortable to know and be able to predict and to travel through the world in familiar ways: Transit Work Grocery Gym
• #22: One way we simplify is to see things through our own lens – things that are like I am – people who do things the way I do them.
• #23: This would allow us to see how our ‘rules’ oversimplify sometimes at the expense of edge cases or counter-examples
• #24: We aren’t always tuned into our emotional responses, yet we have them often and they influence much of what we do or what we decide to do.
• #25: We want things to be neat and clean and knowable and simple. We want predictability And having strong feelings is the sort of thing your crazy sister does – it is frowned upon… but we all have reactions and feelings I can say a few words and just from those words you’ll have reactions: Donald Trump Climate Change 40 degrees celsius Toronto Maple Leafs Balance Due
• #26: When we’re overwhelmed by the diversity of the world, the diversity of people, experiences, situations, we tend to stick to the average. We talk about focusing on the 80% and saying we can’t address the needs of the 20% We let ourselves off the hook – this is that oversimplification… watch out for it!
• #27: Who failed here? We’re often lazy — we take an 80/20 approach to the world because we think we can’t solve for the 20. This, historically, led to a reliance on something called the average — we were taught to think about this as a shortcut. We’re taught to look at the majority, the average, the most — what if we change that perspective and look at the outliers — what can they tell us? What if instead of ignoring the 20, we try to understand what’s going on there… Todd Rose — The End of Average Scatter plot showing a clump of dots and a few outliers https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Scatterplot_r%3D-.76.png
• #28: When we are in the position of “desiging’ through our decisions, we often fall short because of our approach: we approach problems this way
• #29: We try to solve it right away rather than understand the problem, understand the edge cases, understand counter-examples, and address complexity.
• #30: when we are confronted by messy things we turn to a framework for understanding it and for dealing with it: the rule of law the rules of the game the mores of the culture the mores of the institution (it’s the easy way to know what to do — the framework tells us – we go straight to action and we do what has been dictated, what has been done before, what is tried and true. Ex. That’s the way we’ve always done it We have a policy that states we can’t do that That would upset A, B, or C and we can’t do that NMP principle – it’s not my problem – above my pay grade, etc. HR has a policy that tells us what we should do – we’ll ask them team that reports to someone in HR re: PWDs THIS IS NOT OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH INNOVATION OR CULTURE CHANGE and it is sometimes associated with legal action or CYA
• #31: When we don’t have a framework we look for a way to SOLVE the problem — if there isn’t a woman, we bring in a woman. If there isn’t a person of colour or a person with a disability, we bring one in. etc. (it’s the quick recovery thing to do) we run the risk of tokenizing we run the risk of superficially dealing with a complex issue we run the risk of marginalizing – exactly what we are aiming to avoid we run the risk of unintended consequences (criticism, weak culture, divisiveness) When we immediately try to solve the problem (WE DON’T HAVE PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES HERE), we miss opportunities for more deeply engaging and understanding why we don't. This often means we aren’t able to address the root causes, and get stalled out at a potentially superficial level. Ex. We have a person of colour on our board now We have a diversity day/month We have a diversity checklist we have to go through on all projects We did an afternoon of training around biases We have a fact sheet for different disabilities that all employees are required to read From the perspective of the marginalized person the question becomes am I a token or do they respect my mind/ideas/work/perspective? THIS IS NOT OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH INNOVATION OR LASTING CULTURE CHANGE – This is also often easily sniffed out and is transparent to outsiders. It tends to stick out like a sore thumb.
• #32: When we don’t stop at the answers/rules/laws and we acknowledge the superficiality of subbing in the missing puzzle piece (token), then we have an opportunity to nurture inclusion (notice my use of words — I didn’t say create inclusion, I said nurture it) – we have an opportunity to change culture and to be innovative – to lead and show others how it can be done productively in doing that it’s important to remember that  representation matters language matters framing the issue and transparency matters setting the expectations for outcomes matters (goals, success, failures) participation matters it is unlikely that everyone will be happy – conflict can be productive Ex. Microsoft hiring people with disabilities; hiring a CEO whose children live with disabilities; hiring a CAO who is a woman living with a disability; having a program for hiring people on the autism spectrum. Making inclusion a priority at the company — showing that in their product releases and in their culture. National Geographic speaking about the way they’ve portrayed race: For decades our coverage was racist. To rise above our past we must acknowledge it. Mitchell Baker speaking to her team at Mozilla after the Google Jerk’s email went viral… The accessibility team is within the Design team at ScotiaBank — they are where innovation and user-facing anything happens… THIS IS OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH INNOVATION OR LASTING CULTURE CHANGE – If you’re looking for these examples, you’re also often looking for moments of controversy — of failure — of transparency — of discomfort
• #33: The way we do things matters and the way we talk about them too matters to how we continue or even feel finished…
• #34: All of this influences what we do in our world
• #35: We seldom talk about how form and function influence us. And they do – they influence how we think, what we do, and how we see the world. Inclusive Design is design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference. Rule followers
• #36: We are implicitly designing for just some when we ignore the needs of all.
• #37: Tyranny of taxonomies
• #38: We see this sometimes, a focus on the atypical or the unpopular. So many of our systems focus on the usual…
• #39: Our image of masculinity might change to include more Our image of a woman might change We might change the way we market toys We might make changes like Title IX to let girls play We might establish supports and talk openly about this…
• #40: Think Feel Do This gets us back to who is ACTUALLY being designed for when we make decisions?
• #41: Think Feel Do I want to talk about a few other things we do…
• #42: Think Feel Do Misconceptions: thinking and logic If we just explore something (a person, a problem) from all possible angles we can know it, predict it and control it we can FIX it—we can design for it— we can motivate it We all want to be able to reproduce great design and create a process that will validate and yield great design — we want the 10 steps to success! We also try to solve as soon as we are presented with a problem. STOP, understand and be curious FIRST. This is carried out in many fields of study: invasive species eradication in conservation biology example (unintended consequences, illusion of ‘control’) phragmites
• #43: Think Feel Do
• #44: Think Feel Do And just like ecosystems, we are all so complex, so unique — yes, we are individuals, and we are shaped by everything around us. We are all unique tangles of complexity that lurk beneath the surface. culture iceberg showing surface culture and deep or hidden culture generalizing about any one of us might be fun, but it’s sure to yield unreliable results. Many of these cultural items have been debated or caused controversy: Gender roles, clothing, etc. They aren’t fixed or knowable or clear always. Culture shapes us, guides us, gives us structure to live within. We are shaped by it and we choose and shape it… The former more than the latter. Structure (environment, form, the way things are) shapes us.
• #45: Think Feel Do sameness
• #46: difference Think Feel Do And within that iceberg of culture we carve out ourselves, our identities, our choices. We all have opinions. Which news stories do you listen to? Which radio station do you listen to? Which TV news channel do you watch? Where do you get your news? Does it support or challenge your own politics, ideas, ideals? Does it reinforce your culture iceberg or does it expect you to understand another’s?
• #47: Think Feel Do
• #48: Think Feel Do What we see in each other does not tell the whole story. And people are strange and irrational at times, showing anger when it’s mixed up in something that is an earnest and relatable other feeling. We might see anger. But what is the anger and what does it really mean? It could be any of these things just below our waterline. We often have to engage, empathize, have a conversation, understand each other more deeply. What we see is the manifestation of everything that is below the surface. We all have feelings — and they are embedded in our own individual, cumulative narrative. ice berg showing behaviour above waterline and feelings and needs below iceberg showing anger above water line and all the reasons for anger below tell story of user testing with the CMHR universal keypad
• #49: Think Feel Do we are all designers with needs and preferences ice cream counter with many flavours displayed
• #50: Think Feel Do we all design our lives, spaces, interactions, and more — to make ourselves at home and more comfortable and more happy modern living room organized and decorated with stark colours and yellow accents cell phone screen with custom folders and owner’s baby in a photo as background. We all decorate and organize differently…
• #51: Think Feel Do
• #52: We all would sort differently: colour size shape balance age smell texture feel And we feel a completeness and satisfaction with the way we choose to “slice” the world. And we feel delight and buy more things when the way people present them to us delights us. and sometimes we feel compelled to fix a thing - to put the puzzle piece where it ‘should be’ or to yell at our spouse who doesn’t put the knives where they ‘should be’ eggs in cups sorted by colour Tom Binh bag contents presented in neat, orderly fashion and then photographed puzzle with one piece out of place a beautiful bird with wings spread showing symmetry spice cabinet neatly arranged utensil drawer in kitchen with things in exact places
• #53: And yet we all follow the same rules – cultural rules, thinking rules, feeling rules, doing rule. Adherence to the rule is what we’re taught but we know that divergence from the rule is innovation and creativity… So where do we get this?? How did we inherit this?
• #54: Who failed here? We’re often lazy — we take an 80/20 approach to the world because we think we can’t solve for the 20. This, historically, led to a reliance on something called the average — we were taught to think about this as a shortcut. We’re taught to look at the majority, the average, the most — what if we change that perspective and look at the outliers — what can they tell us? What if instead of ignoring the 20, we try to understand what’s going on there… Todd Rose — The End of Average Scatter plot showing a clump of dots and a few outliers https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Scatterplot_r%3D-.76.png
• #55: So, we’ve established that we are all unique and we are motivated by things ‘beneath the surface’ that are evolving and changing and mutating and that mean we are growing and changing everyday. So, from the design perspective, how on earth can we understand what we think and feel and what we’ll do? How can we design for us? built upon common design practices with additional principles, practices, and tools used for the benefit of all end-users. it’s better design resist the urge to generalize
• #56: So, we’ve established that we are all unique and we are motivated by things ‘beneath the surface’ that are evolving and changing and mutating and that mean we are growing and changing everyday. So, from the design perspective, how on earth can we understand what we think and feel and what we’ll do? How can we design for us? built upon common design practices with additional principles, practices, and tools used for the benefit of all end-users. it’s better design resist the urge to generalize
• #59: Let people and the world be complex, sometimes chaotic, unpredictable
• #60: Beyond the simple and same – what we can do is undo the short-thinking of those who have been architecting our world by questioning and looking at how it has failed us Re-think how we ask the question
• #61: Acknowledge feelings – think about what you’re doing from anothers’ perspective – who might be offended by this? Who got excluded just now? How does someone else perceive this – NOT how do I feel about this… Who might have strong feelings?
• #63: We talk about inviting people to the table – Who are we inviting, how are we inviting them, and are we setting them up for failure…
• #65: It’s harder in the built environment but there is plenty we can do to change form and function!
• #66: Stop fetishizing data Unintended consequences Dad and yellow cars… If you’re a decider – you have a responsibility to know your bias. Men have to be part of the conversation because men, disproportionately, are making the decisions.
• #67: When we let go of notion of clarity, we see differently.
• #69: Instead, start with people – real people people, users, us, them, all, everyone, my mom, your mom, his mom, and more
• #70: So, how do we define or understand who are on the edges? Who are edge users?
• #71: Instead, start with people – real people people, users, us, them, all, everyone, my mom, your mom, his mom, and more
• #73: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity this comes from clarity, strong leadership, and confidence
• #74: avoid the token solution to the problem… wonder, ask why, ask more, ask questions — how can you get to know me?
• #75: And we know creativity, experimentation, questioning assumptions, and failure are closely related to innovation… kids are good at this, adults less so. As adults, what’s the first thing we do when presented with a problem? WE SOLVE IT — we don’t want to skin our knees. We want to get to solutions fast, efficiently. We’re busy! And when we do that, we introduce assumptions or we perpetuate them (knowingly or not). How often do we hear or behave in a “That’s the way we’ve always done it” manner? But what if it wasn’t? The LightBulb What if we slowed down and didn’t race to the finish, but spent time on the hard, the complex? We at the IDRC stumbled upon something that seems to hold some of the secrets to innovation — and that is to really understand the problem you’re trying to solve, look to the edges where it’s currently failing to meet needs or perform. Those edges are often the extremes (extreme hot or extreme cold, extremely busy or extremely distracted, extremely strong, extremely weak). And this is the perspective shift that inclusive design brings us… 3 kids with skinned knees https://www.flickr.com/photos/theloushe/4630743266/in/photolist-84cLD9-6aJifh-2kUyK-fjxqAu-yA7Bw-hjQKc3-kpzP6x-gKfCM-yA7Br-499dY-4i8wVP-88F5zy-aoQPQc-nKQJQi-f5bAkX-8d7G1D-crYbzb-dSMYUY-hPjrmR-p3SToX-8eeJKQ-p3T4aa-4stR9T-Mnt19-7JnWR-nUuCpS-9JPb8w-awBeAc-rBUPem-7KLPot-8ewzdm-9hkGYk-8qVgNs-2qDqNC-bJLYGg-oLEes2-fhLbKE-GgexGw-oLEfYP-d6pSe-e6Zmjg-9EFqFx-6bKiWZ-e7vMAH-dT5y9B-nmgVY-f4STJ6-cfPSHs-p27npC-aJk6wD
• #77: This new way of thinking, feeling, and doing is deeply related to issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. They are big, universal problems – they make us reconsider our behaviour and our decisions and our thoughts – this is the re-thinking that goes on in design-thinking. Barbara Chow beware the cycles of exclusion
• #79: search is driven by commercial biases public knowledge, libraries — seen through the commercial, privately held company’s search engine algorithms are automated decisions
• #80: Remember: we’re all designers A good portion of Pinterest is dedicated to the thoughtful design of everyday things in innovative and surprising ways. We learn from how someone else imagined using something and we riff off of it. children’s rain boots nailed to a fence and used as flower pots a basic lamp that someone builds a lego structure around with holes to let the light through and shine colours
• #81: white table with brightly coloured stick figures sitting around it
• #82: Instead of fearing the edges or trying to forget them we should be focusing on them. the business imperative -- and why accessibility is moving forward -- not just the litigious reason or the bleeding heart reason -- it’s the usability reason we stumbled onto something here…
• #83: So, spend a moment to think about what you measure And what are your goals?
• #84: we measure profit, we measure demographic diversity, we measure retention, we measure growth, we measure loyalty
• #85: We often stop short when we’re collecting numbers. We give numbers a primacy — treat them like a pure, objective truth. Numbers themselves aren’t truth — especially when the numbers concern people and all their uniquenesses. Who determines the questions to ask the data? How is the question articulated? We all suffer from a fondness for confirmation bias - How do we confront that?
• #87: false confidence and completion We may say we aren’t political, we aren’t an activist and those things can all be true. What is also true is that nothing we do or say is neutral. It is embedded in our experiences and our context. We make choices (and I’ll call them design choices) all the time. How our living room is arranged, the settings on our seat in the car (manufacturers understood that we needed to save pre-settings — 2 of them) Mom and Dad drive — what about when their child gets a driver’s license? https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=8038&picture=mountain-stream-2
• #88: Where we put a table, how we fabricate and install a door. We may say we aren’t political, we aren’t an activist and those things can all be true. What is also true is that nothing we do or say is neutral. It is embedded in our experiences and our context. We make choices and with each choice we are excluding any number of other choices. The notion of objectivity is intertwined with our experiences and our context.
• #89: This marks a gap in our cultural space — what do you do after you make a mistake?
• #90: Ruin vision and decision-making — ask yourself, is there a bias embedded in what I just did? Am I just copy/pasting something that will perpetuate exclusion?
• #91: Ruin vision and decision-making — ask yourself, is there a bias embedded in what I just did? Am I just copy/pasting something that will perpetuate exclusion?
• #93: Begin with QUESTIONING — what ideas persist?
• #94: So when we build products and services and tools we should be asking all along who isn’t here? And who got excluded? One way we do this in the digital world is to make it multi-modal - text - audio - video - image avoid hard to read fonts or font sizes create an appropriate level of contrast simulations and visualization provide interesting challenges make targets easy to hit can you use it with the keyboard? be wary of time-based operations keep content structured — semantic content But if we just wrap ourselves in WCAG and AODA, we are still missing the point: people are unique, there are gaps in meeting their needs, innovation is in the gaps. Now let’s look at some examples of filling gaps creatively.
• #95: As designers of the spaces we travel in and the interactions we have, who are we designing for? people, users, us, them, all, everyone, my mom, your mom, his mom, and more Inclusive Design is design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference. But how do we know everything about everybody and all this difference is overwhelming! First, you have to think differently…
• #100: When you ask me to conform to your structure and your rules I feel less empowered, I feel excluded, I feel as though you’re the expert and I know nothing and I’m in the job centre where I already feel vulnerable and weak and unsure and anxious
• #103: My mom was worried – my whole childhood she was worried. She was worried the world wouldn’t be flexible enough for me – she worried I was too unusual or not average. As the woman in the NBC video sais, “We need women who are willing to take the risk” – you took a risk on me today and I thank you…