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
   

   View Slide

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

   View Slide

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

   View Slide

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)
   “
   

   View Slide

5. 5
   EDGE CASES
   

   View Slide

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.”
   

   View Slide

7. View Slide

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)
   “
   

   View Slide

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)
   “
   

   View Slide

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

    View Slide

11. 11
    CENTER AS DEFAULT
    

    View Slide

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)
    “
    

    View Slide

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)
    “
    

    View Slide

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)
    “
    

    View Slide

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

    View Slide

16. 16
    EDGES & OTHERS
    

    View Slide

17. View Slide

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

    View Slide

19. 19
    Distance does matter.
    

    View Slide

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)
    “
    

    View Slide

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.
    

    View Slide

22. 22
    THANK YOU
    @singerde
    

    View Slide