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

Dan Singer
November 09, 2017

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.

Dan Singer

November 09, 2017
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Transcript

  1. IT GOES WITHOUT
    SAYING
    Default and Other in Edge Cases
    World Usability Day Philly 2017
    Dan Singer, UX Strategist, O3 World

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  2. 2
    If inclusive design is to be a radical
    institutional change, what is it that
    we’re changing?

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  3. 3
    The way we think about the world is
    stitched into our work.

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  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)

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  5. 5
    EDGE CASES

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  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.”

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  7. 7

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  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)

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  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)

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  10. 10
    A center can stay centered by going
    without saying.

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  11. 11
    CENTER AS DEFAULT

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  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)

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  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)

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  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)

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  15. 15
    We decide who we’re not designing for
    in order to implicitly state who we are
    designing for.

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  16. 16
    EDGES & OTHERS

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  17. 17

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  18. 18
    Empathy can be used to emphasize and
    internalize the distance between
    powerful and powerless.

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  19. 19
    Distance does matter.

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  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 [email protected] (199: 209)

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  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.

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  22. 22
    THANK YOU
    @singerde

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