It Goes Without Saying: Default and Other In Edge Cases - World Usability Day Philly 2017

This talk focuses on the way in which we think about edge cases reflects and shapes the concepts that we hold about our work.

Presented for World Usability Day Philly 2017.

Transcript

1. IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING Default and Other in Edge Cases World Usability Day Philly 2017 Dan Singer, UX Strategist, O3 World
2. 2 If inclusive design is to be a radical institutional change, what is it that we’re changing?
3. 3 The way we think about the world is stitched into our work.
4. 4 Concepts are at work in how we work, whatever it is that we do. We need to work out, sometimes, what these concepts are….because concepts can be murky as background assumptions. Concepts are the worlds we are in. SARA AHMED, Living a Feminist Life (2017: 13) “
5. 5 EDGE CASES
6. 6 EDGE CASES Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer write that the industry defines edge cases as circumstances that “affect an insignificant number of users.”
8. 8 We’ve chosen to look at these not as edge cases but as stress cases: the moments that put our design and content choices to the test of real life. ERIC MEYER & SARA WACHTER-BOETTCHER, Design for Real Life (2016: 2) “
9. 9 A designer does not believe in edge cases. When you decide who you’re designing for, you’re making an implicit statement about who you’re not designing for. MIKE MONTEIRO, A Designer’s Code of Ethics (2017) “
10. 10 A center can stay centered by going without saying.
11. 11 CENTER AS DEFAULT
12. 12 Who has to take extra steps to make technology work? Who are the default settings optimized for? JOY BUOLAMWINI, “Algorithms aren’t racist. Your skin is just too dark.” (2017) “
13. 13 A designer does not believe in edge cases. When you decide who you’re designing for, you’re making an implicit statement about who you’re not designing for. MIKE MONTEIRO, A Designer’s Code of Ethics (2017) “
14. 14 A designer does not believe in edge cases. When you decide who you’re designing for, you’re making an implicit statement about who you’re not designing for. MIKE MONTEIRO, A Designer’s Code of Ethics (2017) “
15. 15 We decide who we’re not designing for in order to implicitly state who we are designing for.
16. 16 EDGES & OTHERS
18. 18 Empathy can be used to emphasize and internalize the distance between powerful and powerless.
19. 19 Distance does matter.
20. 20 This is an intervention. A message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonized/colonizer. Marginality as site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators. bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Poli@cs (199: 209) “
21. 21 The way we think about edge cases can maintain a supremacy of the powerful in two complementary ways: 1. Hide the center in the defaults. 2. Reposition the margins as in need of saving.
22. 22 THANK YOU @singerde