4
Purpose & community
Understanding the role of Design beyond producing designs—and the far-reaching impact it can have on the world at large.
Design is not only a job. It’s a way to provoke change in the world, and that comes with responsibility. What type of change do you want to create?
Goal
Be more aware of the impact of our design decisions.
Illustrations by Michela Picchi
You’ve probably heard in the news that social media apps can cause addiction, or that location tracking apps can represent a threat to the user’s privacy if their data gets into the wrong hands.
Although most digital products are created with good intentions, we can’t always control or predict how they’ll be used by people once they’re out in the world.
Your duty as a designer is to keep that bigger picture in mind as you’re creating a product — just as architects must account for the safety of their buildings.
As a designer who works for a company, you’ll be asked to use your design skills to generate more engagement, more views, more profit.
Use your voice to advocate for your users. Speak up to protect them from addiction, misinformation, and violations of their rights. Push back on company decisions that can potentially spread misinformation, misbehavior, or injustice. Bring this mindset with you every day. You can define where your product’s boundaries are, and block your design superpowers from being used for evil.
“Should you decide to choose courage over comfort and challenge our understanding and practice of empathy, human-centered design can be more than a cliche.”
The other side of this is to make sure your product can be used by everyone. The term Accessibility speaks to whether your product is usable to people with varying abilities. As designers, we tend to think that the users we are designing for people who are really similar to ourselves. That’s not true. You’ll hear this motto quite a lot in digital product design: you are not your user.
As designers, we spend most of our day imagining and building experiences that, when added all together, take up a significant portion of people’s lives. They affect the relationships they have with other people and with the world around them. Each design decision we make has the potential to include, or exclude, people. It’s part of our responsibility to make users feel welcome, included, and represented in the experiences we create. UX Design—and the mindset of bringing users into the design process—exists to reduce gaps between who is creating a product and who is using it. Inclusive design is about closing the gap between people.
Over the next few years, you’ll hear the term Accessibility more and more as you start to engage with the design community. While following accessibility guidelines is a good starting point, designers should also be the ones advocating for better practices when it comes to creating products that are truly inclusive of all audiences.
Topics such as Design Ethics, Inclusion, and Accessibility obviously can’t be summarized in one page, but you will have time to learn about them over the course of your career. The most important thing for now, as you start out, is to understand why these concepts need to exist and keep an open mind toward learning more about them.
Reading list
1.
Design for
the Real World
The attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product; a blueprint for sensible, responsible design. By Victor Papanek.
2.
Accessibility
for Everyone
A guide for the accessibility landscape; learn how to plan for, evaluate, and test accessible design. By Laura Kalbag.
Borrow these books from local public libraries or buy from local bookstores.
3.
Respect is the one value
Cyd Harrell (6 min)
4.
An incomplete list of resources for the equity-centered designer
Isabelle Yisak (6 min)
5.
It’s time we dealt with white supremacy in tech
Tiffani Ashley Bell (6 min)
6.
Diversity & design: a series
UX Collective (45 min)
7.
Designing for accessibility is not that hard
Pablo Stanley (12 min)
8.
The politics of design
Ruben Pater (15 min)
9.
The league of evil designers
Linnéa Strid (6 min)
10.
Redesigners for Justice: the leaders we need for an equitable future
Creative Reaction Lab (5 min)
1.
Building socially-inclusive design systems
Tatiana Mac
2.
Hacking digital style guides for Accessibility: type, colour, imagery
Tatiana Mac
3.
Community + technology = positive social change
Ellen Ward and Máirín Murray
4.
How art gives shape to cultural change Thelma Golden
5.
Design No Harm: Why Humility is Essential in the Journey Toward Equity
Antionette D. Carroll
Watchlist
From your readings, what’s the difference between accessibility, inclusion, and diversity? What are some practical examples of how each one is applied to the design work?
There are several design decisions that carry a lot of bias (e.g. "male" usually comes before ”female” in gender questionnaires). Over the next day, keep an eye on other biases in the products and services you use (e.g. apps, websites). Where do you think these biases come from, and what do you think should have been done differently to avoid them?
Reflection
See it in practice
Tech companies have (finally) start to be under scrutiny and to be held accountable for their critical issues related to lack of accessibility, discrimination, malpratices. Examples are the Domino's accessibility lawsuit, the numerous fake news issues on social media, and racial bias on artificial intelligence software.
As designers, we play a big role in fixing and ultimately preventing these issues from happening. The first step for seasoned and new designers is to understand the impact of our work on our society and keep society at the center of our design process. You can read more about case studies (here and here) and practical guides on this topic to see it in practice.
Take this opportunity to evaluate the apps and sites you use and how they follow or not some concepts introduced in this chapter.
![Abstract shapes](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-f69f1a9c-8a7f-4b81-8c90-44bd2d19aee8.jpg?w=1006&e=webp)
![Illustration of a unicorn](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-a2a45db2-3f5d-4688-870b-8035a5312aa8.jpg?w=1006&e=webp)
![Book:L design for the real world](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-f9f1b642-4f86-414e-9a33-07e06435afc5.png?w=196&e=webp&nll=true)
![Book: accessibility for everyone](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-2e6fbfcf-f85d-4d2f-b415-150e91ee4507.png?w=196&e=webp&nll=true)