This webinar is part of our Impact by Design events series. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all experiencing new ways of communicating, collaborating, and problem-solving. At Artefact, we want to share the experiences and insights that we are learning as we navigate this new terrain with our partners. Join us in exploring how to use design to adapt to uncertainty.
Baobab is a digital social learning platform for African students who are part of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program. Designed by Arizona State University and Artefact, it provides learning tools, mentorship, and opportunities to connect and collaborate with other Scholars across the continent.
Baobab has been a key tool to help students who can no longer access their campuses due to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic continue their learning. In this virtual session, Artefact’s Eric Croskey and Bethany Weigele of Arizona State University discuss how the Baobab platform pivoted to deliver learning content in new ways, and the features and modalities digital communities need to help people engage, learn, and collaborate in a remote world.
This webinar is part of our Impact by Design events series. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all experiencing new ways of communicating, collaborating, and problem-solving. At Artefact, we want to share the experiences and insights that we are learning as we navigate this new terrain with our partners. Join us in exploring how to use design to adapt to uncertainty.
Decision-making is often fraught with uncertainty. How can we adapt design principles that support clinical decision-making to navigate the ambiguity facing public health today?
In this webinar, Artefact Executive Creative Director and Healthcare Practice Lead Matthew Jordan and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute Associate Investigator Karen Wernli explore how design can support the clinical decision-making process with data in the face of uncertainty.
The conversation draws from the Artefact-KPWHRI partnership designing the SIMBA decision aid app helping breast cancer survivors make informed choices about their breast imaging options. Discover key design principles that can inform our approach to the current pandemic – and future public health issues.
Remote Reality: How to Adapt Methods and Maintain Momentum for Workshops
Image courtesy of Splash International
This webinar is part of our Impact by Design events series. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all experiencing new ways of communicating, collaborating, and problem-solving. At Artefact, we want to share the experiences and insights that we are learning as we navigate this new terrain with our partners. Join us in exploring how to use design to adapt to uncertainty.
International development organization Splash and Artefact partnered to facilitate a three-day strategy summit for their girls’ menstrual health programs in Ethiopia and India. Convening the world’s leading menstrual health experts, the original intention of the summit was to set a vision, strategy, and defined roadmap for Splash’s menstrual health interventions. Due to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, Splash and Artefact pivoted the event into a virtual summit with clear, actionable next steps for all 30 participants across several different countries.
In this webinar, Artefact Design Director Hannah Hoffman sat down with Emily Davis, Program Manager for Menstrual Health from Splash, to share three principles that guided us in adapting design thinking methods for success in a remote environment. Learn actionable strategies for adapting your work that will serve you in our current remote reality – and the future to come.
Dear Clients, Design Community, and Artefact Family,
We have been closely
monitoring the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and wanted to send out a
note to our community about what we are doing and how we have been updating our
procedures based on recommendations
from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), as well as state and international
agencies.
As always, our first priority is to protect the health of our clients, employees, their families, and those in our community.
Additionally, we want
to continue to pivot our working styles and collaboration methods so that we
can do our part to slow community transmission of the virus while continuing to
deliver the highest quality work.
In order to achieve this, we are following guidance for social distancing and beginning last Thursday, we recommended that all Artefact employees work virtually, from home until at least April 24, 2020. Pending changes in recommendations from the CDC and local public health organizations, this date will likely be extended. As a digital agency, we are fortunate that all our tools and services are cloud based and that we’ve experienced minimal disruption moving entirely to a telecommuting posture. We are encouraged to see our staff exercise considerable creativity in how they are utilizing tools in order to effectively collaborate, design, and run workshops while working remotely with our clients.
We also stopped all domestic and international work travel until further
notice. Our studio is in the epicenter of the US outbreak and we find ourselves
in a position of needing to make responsible choices to reduce the spread of
COVID-19.
If you are a current client, you may have already seen or heard about these changes in how we are conducting business and we want to say thank you in advance for your adoption of these working styles given the volatile state we are all in.
We’ll continue sharing updates on the COVID-19 situation as they
evolve. If you have questions, please reach out to shauna@artefactgroup.com.
Stay safe and healthy,
Rob Girling, Co-CEO
Gavin Kelly, Co-CEO
Design
Dungeons & Dragons: A secret to stronger design thinking
Last year, a few colleagues at Artefact implored me to run a game of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) for them, as none of them had played before. Though I played for years in college, I had never facilitated a game and was excited to give it a shot. Having rediscovered the hobby now as a professional, I realize that playing D&D has made me a better designer – not only because it allows me to develop related skills and flex creative muscles outside of the constraints of day-to-day professional work, but because it often reminds me of key philosophies and mindsets of design that are otherwise easy to forget.
Associate Strategy Director and dungeon master extraordinaire Jeff Turkelson
Becoming a Better Facilitator
“You disembark at the coastal city of Silverport just as
the sun sets below the horizon. Hundreds of sky lanterns hover just above the
city, illuminating the white stone buildings in a soft, warm glow. You’ve apparently
arrived during some kind of festival; a fellow passenger complains out loud
that it’ll be impossible to find any room at the inn with such festivities
happening. What do you do after stepping off the ship?”
Dungeons and Dragons is a pen and paper roleplaying game
where people play fantasy characters like elvish wizards and dwarven
barbarians, fighting monsters to get loot and become more powerful. It’s
similar to a board game in that it’s typically played around a table using dice
and other paraphernalia, but unlike most board games where rules narrowly define
a few actions you can take during your turn, playing D&D is more like being
an actor in an improvised play where your options are open-ended. In this way,
D&D can be thought of as structured collaborative storytelling.
One person – referred to as the dungeon master (DM) or game master (GM) – facilitates the game by describing an imaginary world, while the rest of the players each take the role of a single character within that world. In the course of the game/story, the DM describes situations that the other players find themselves in, and the rest of the players describe what their characters do in response.
That’s the role I took on for my friends – creating a world and facilitating their adventures within it. It’s a lot of work, but taking on the mantle of DM has helped me become a better communicator and facilitator in a design context. As a DM you have to plan and create materials for each session that provide enough structure to be prepared, but flexible enough to accommodate the many different ways the game can play out. You have to manage different players’ inputs, making sure everyone is heard and invested in the experience. And you have to think on your feet to manage the extreme unpredictability of each session.
Leading a group along a collaborative, sometimes chaotic
journey of creation deeply parallels the skills needed to successfully
facilitate workshops with users, clients, and other stakeholders. Each session
of D&D may as well be another workshop under my belt.
Practicing Empathy
Player 1, the warrior: “We should just kill the bandit
leader and collect the bounty!”
Player 2, the priest: “No, my character believes everyone
deserves a chance at redemption. Let’s find another way.”
One of the first things a player does in D&D is create a
character sheet that describes not only their character’s name, skills, and
abilities, but also their behavioral traits, flaws, and goals. Do they respect
the law or do they play by their own rules? Are they selfless or on a personal
quest? Are they well-connected or a loner?
Playing a character isn’t just doing whatever it takes to
win the game, it’s acting how one’s character would behave in a given
situation, and sometimes that means doing something risky, costly, or
self-defeating. You have to consider their values, their motivations, and their
overall understanding of a situation (or lack thereof).
Designers often talk about building empathy for their users,
which typically amounts to doing some user research to better understand their
needs or soliciting feedback. But empathy is more than an intellectual
understanding of someone else’s preferences. Empathy is a degree of emotional
understanding, feeling the way someone else does and understanding why they
think and act the way they do.
Building empathy for users is a serious subject and of course a game is not sufficient on its own to fostering a consistently empathetic mindset. Yet empathy is one of the most important – and difficult to achieve – skills that a designer can have. Spending weeks, months, or years playing the role of people very different from yourself is good practice for when you are seeking to empathize with, not just understand, your users.
Managing Unintended Consequences
“You have discovered the scroll of cat summoning. When you read its incantation, a normal house cat appears at your feet. If the cat is lost or killed, reading the incantation will summon the same cat back at your feet.”
In the game I ran for my colleagues, I designed a magical “scroll
of cat summoning” as a fun little item for one of my players who loved cats. I
thought that giving them a pet in the game that could never be lost could offer
some nice narrative flourish. But what I didn’t expect was the party’s
immediate response upon discovering the scroll:
“Great! We have an unlimited supply of meat whenever we
travel!”
Had I stopped to think like an adventurer who would face the challenges of foraging and hunting for food on long, harrowing journeys, perhaps I would have realized my mistake.
Today, companies are facing public backlash for the
unintended consequences of their product decisions, and there is a growing
movement amongst designers and technologists to stop and consider the
unintended consequences of the things they create. It can be hard to appreciate
the value of thinking through the possible consequences of your design when it
all feels so theoretical, but I’m frequently reminded of its importance while
playing D&D.
Ready for your quest?
Each session of D&D is a designed experience, borne out
of research and planning, supported by crafted materials, and played out with
all of the unpredictability people are known for. Much like how speculative
design is an exercise in exploring a subject free from constraints like budget,
client needs, or technical feasibility, D&D is an opportunity to flex a
variety of design skills in a fun, engaging way that may not always be possible
in the context of day-to-day tasks.
Given the surge in popularity of D&D in the last few years, I’d be willing to bet most designers know someone in their office or class who could run a game with them. I encourage you to embark on your own quest and see what experiences and new skills you discover along the way!
It started with the need to create space. Space to be yourself. Space to tell your stories. A place to find connections and build community.
This November, Artefact was delighted to partner with Womxn of Color in Tech to host a meetup for our community. We welcomed 65 women of color to the studio to talk tech and social justice – the first event of its kind for Artefact.
Womxn of Color in Tech is on a mission to cultivate spaces and programs that explore and design a world of technology that centers around womxn, grrls, and communities of color. I was thrilled to meet founder Janell Jordan, as one of my goals at Artefact this year is to help foster a community for women of color.
Working at Artefact is the first time in my career where I’ve had a woman of color as a mentor, and the first place I’ve worked where someone has advocated for me as a woman of color. It has changed how I see myself and how I show up in the workplace. I wanted to create a space for others to feel the same.
In the tech industry, women of color are often in environments where our peers or those at the leadership level don’t reflect us. We don’t have the space to talk about our shared experiences, reflect, and get advice from one another.
An understanding of “space” guided our intentions for the day – from opening with a moment of gratitude for the Duwamish tribal land we inhabit, to ensuring all participants were empowered to participate through accessibility support like ASL interpretation.
The meetup centered around creating a welcoming place for women in tech from different backgrounds and in different places in their careers to connect with each other. We shared experiences – positive and negative – and explored ideas around creating allyship and workplace support. The day was filled with inspiration, mentorship, and empowerment – all set to a soundtrack of strong women artists of color.
One of the topics we touched was on what brings you happiness and how you hold onto it. I’ve thought back to this meetup often as one of those moments. I think about the people I met, the stories shared, and the feeling of being able to show up as our true selves at that moment. In an industry where we often feel isolated, there are other women of color out there looking – and making space for – the community.
I look forward to continuing Artefact’s partnership with Womxn of Color in Tech and am particularly excited to support a youth program that will bring young women of color to our studio next year to job shadow women at Artefact.
“Had a blast at the WOC in Tech meetup this weekend. I learned a lot. I loved meeting new people and hearing about their experiences and how they got to where they are now. I need to go to more things like this!”
Meriel M. – UX Designer
“What a great time sharing experiences and finding solutions to bring down barriers in the workplace related to diversity and inclusion. Met some amazing and inspiring women today, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else Womxn of Color in Tech will be working on!”
Lita G. – Systems Engineer
“I can’t stop thinking about the women I met at the Womxn of Color in Tech Summit last week at Artefact. Their stories, some as traumatizing as my own in Corporate America, assured me that I’m not alone in the struggles we’re facing daily to EXIST in spaces we may not always feel we belong in or sometimes not gracefully welcomed into…I hope more black women and women of color continue speaking up and out so things will continue to change and get better.”
Designing with – not for – the Changing Face of Global Health
Sheryl Cababa
“How do we integrate human-centered design in
problem solving for global health?”
This was the question posed at the Gates Foundation and USAID human-centered design and global health convening: DesignforHealth: Nio Far Dakar. In Wolof, “nio far” means “we are together.” It was an appropriate title to the gathering, which brought together more than 70 invited design practitioners and global health experts from the world over for three days of reflection, ideation, and strategy.
As a host city, Dakar is the perfect venue for discussions about the future of human-centered design. The city is rapidly changing, from its loss of public spaces for children, to its role in Chinese investment in the region, to its importance in modern African art. The conference took place at the beautiful new Museum of Black Civilisations, which opened in January 2019. As a venue that is reflective of a changing Africa – and partially funded by the Chinese government – it is symbolic of how our global future is moving from north to south, and from west to east.
Over the course of the convening, we broke out into five “missions” to envision the future of human-centered design within global health: achieving scale, creating a design curriculum, managing design, understanding the return on design, and developing integrated approaches. Each mission had a mix of design practitioners and global health experts from organizations as diverse as PATH, McKinsey, Nairobi Design Institute, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Working through these challenges with my peers in design and subject matter experts left me with three key takeaways on designing for global health.
1. Understanding global trends helps shape our thinking on the future of our design practice.
To kick off the workshop, Mari Tikkanen of social impact company Scope introduced trends to think about as we consider our mission of using human-centered design in global health. Urbanization, changing demographics, and transformative tech were key themes, all of which are affected by our changing climate. For example, I learned that there are currently about 19 megacities (a city with a population of 10 million or more). By 2030, there will be an additional eight megacities, all but one of which will be in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In order to engage in human-centered design, we need to better understand cultures and ways of working in the global south as this is where we can have the greatest impact on global health. A Western lens on global problems is no longer enough.
2. User-centered design (UCD) is not equal to human-centered design (HCD).
Engaging with a group of talented human-centered design practitioners reminded me how often the tech industry uses the term “human-centered design” while actually practicing “user-centered design.” The difference matters. When we are solving for large-scale problems that touch many different stakeholders, the person who “uses” a design solution is just one stakeholder. Human-centered design should take the entire context into consideration, including those who may not be direct users. For example, with medical devices used in hospital settings, it may be hospital administration that has a greater influence on a device’s use than direct users. Examining the outcomes of our solutions on a broader set of stakeholders helps us develop programs or products that have fewer negative externalities and the most positive impact.
3. Want to be more inclusive? Engage in co-creation.
As we spoke about how to create a design curriculum, the conversation revolved around investing in design as part of in-country global health programs. It reminded me of an exhibit at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center called “Design With the 90 Percent” that explores designing for marginalized communities. “With” is the operative word here: what does it mean to design with those who are the beneficiaries of our design work, rather than designing for them? It means engaging in the hard work of helping non-designers contribute to our designed solutions. In designer Chris Elawa’s excellent article “Stop Designing For Africa,” D-Rev CEO Krista Donaldson says, “Without immersion with users, without being in-situ, without a sense of culture, language, norms, and deep understanding of the problems faced , an iterative product development process slips from market-pull to technology push.” In other words, we need to understand the human need first, and what that requires is help from the humans whose problems we are helping to solve. Some ideas for greater inclusion: investing in cultivating in-country design expertise and training on-the-ground community health care workers in design thinking skills and processes to help them innovate in their work.
As we see a convergence of technology,
healthcare, and non-Western centers of power, we can use human-centered design
to inform a shift in thinking. In order to be able to respond to the pace of
global change, let’s ask ourselves, “How might we apply a creative approach to
large-scale emerging health problems?” The world can’t afford to wait.
It’s not every day
that you get to meet an icon. I had the opportunity to speak with a personal
hero of mine last week, indomitable tech journalist Kara Swisher, who was in
town giving a talk Artefact organized in partnership with Seattle Arts and
Lectures. As witty and wry as ever, her conversation revolved around the pertinent
themes of technology usage, industry regulation, and some pointed commentary on
Jack Dorsey’s beard.
In reflecting on Kara’s lecture and recent high-profile criticism of the tech industry, however, I got to thinking about the current all-or-nothing approach to technology in our culture. The general response to Big Tech’s many missteps has been to run away from it – be it by limiting our screen time or scrambling to #DeleteFacebook. This abstinence-only reaction is dangerous because it doesn’t help us understand how to relate to the ubiquitous technology in our lives. Rather than retreat from technology, we need to figure out how to coexist with it. I’ve been thinking about our evolving human relationship with technology in three ways:
1. Governance and technology need each other.
From airbags to the Internet, technological innovations often
wouldn’t exist or thrive without government investment, subsidy or governance.
When we look across the Pacific to China, we see a state that is investing
heavily in tech and is extremely innovative. More
often than not in unethical ways.
When it comes to tech oversight, Silicon Valley has long
pushed the narrative that they are the good guys in a struggle between American
tech interests and authoritarian foreign governments – “It’s Xi or me,” as Kara
put it, in reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping. This fearmongering has
scared politicians into thinking that we should not regulate the U.S. tech industry
for fear of becoming the kind of Big Brother state we see elsewhere in the
world.
Yet we can’t accept that logic at face value. We don’t want authoritarian states running the next information age, but we also must question ourselves and Silicon Valley on the products we create and how they impact society. The conversation won’t be easy for the tech industry or government. Throughout history, industry in the U.S. has been bad at regulating itself (we only need to look at how dangerous food used to be before regulation as an example). However, one thing we often forget is that government support and intervention often spurs innovation. Elon Musk, for example, received $5 billion in funding from the U.S. government to finance SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City. The tension between Silicon Valley and regulatory bodies is only when they fear regulation will keep them from amassing huge concentrations of wealth.
2. Beware of “benign” organizational culture.
There’s an important connection between the perception of
tech companies as having a “harmless” organizational culture and the lack of
regulation in the tech industry. We don’t hear about this relationship as often
as we should. Kara touched on the infantilization of Silicon Valley leadership
and the misguided notion that they’re just a bunch of kids tinkering in
garages. In truth, they are some of the most powerful individuals in the world
making decisions that affect billions of people across the globe. Just because
they wear hoodies and flip flops and don’t look like a Wall Street executive
doesn’t mean they aren’t as powerful – or savvy.
In Artefact’s social
media systems map, we identified how “organizational CULTure,” as we call
it, affects the design of social networks. The idea that technology is neutral –
and the lack of priority around fixing the problems facing social media – has to
do with an organizational culture devoid of diversity at the leadership level.
So many of tech’s decision-makers have not been personally touched by the
negative impact of their products or suffered as much as other people have at
the hands of their creations. Sri
Lanka and Myanmar
come to mind.
Of course, we need the skills and talents of tech leaders to work toward solutions, but they currently do not have an incentive to improve a harmful experience that they have not had – and will never go through – on their platform. In fact, they profit from this lack of intervention. We need to expand our definition of stakeholders. We need to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and those who don’t have a seat at the table yet bear the brunt of its negative consequences. We also need to treat leaders in tech as the formidable industry titans that they are, and hold them responsible for the outcomes of their products.
3. Social media is not equivalent to climate change.
I’ll be the first to criticize social media for its negative
consequences in the world, but I’m starting to feel fatigued by the
vilification of social networks as the root cause of all of our problems.
Particularly when this criticism comes from those who have a vested interest in
cooperating with the tech industry.
The argument that all of the tech industry’s problems have
to do with the attention economy are starting to become platitudes. Cable TV
brought us ideological news programming. Traditional media were gatekeepers to
information. We can’t forget that the world was imperfect before social media.
These platforms are exacerbating existing problems, and it is dangerous to
ignore the exogenous or underlying factors that are driving issues like bullying
and disinformation campaigns online.
We start to discount our own arguments when we fail to
acknowledge what might be positive about having social networks. Online
communities have helped marginalized people find and support each other. Black
Twitter, for example, is an important outlet that gives many people a voice
they had not had before. I get value out of social networks that help me learn
from people I don’t normally interact with in real life. I can’t invalidate the
entirety of these social media experiences. It’s starting to feel like we’re
throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Rather than discount Big Tech altogether, let’s work to design products responsibly, embrace
thoughtful regulation, and shape our individual usage in healthy and productive ways. Technology
doesn’t have to downgrade humanity – unless we let it.
Ability and flexibility: Designing technology for everyone
Last summer, in a dark auditorium somewhere around Minneapolis, EYEO hosted a series of lightning round presentations. Among the presenters that night was Claire Kearney-Volpe, a doctoral candidate and research fellow for the Ability Project at NYU. At the outset of her talk, she presented a simple form for the audience to fill out. That form had one not-so-subtle transformation: it was all set in Wingdings, a font designed as a series of glyphs that rendered the form incomprehensible.
Why Wingdings? Oftentimes, the simplest tasks – whether it’s entering a building or browsing the web – can be tedious, or even impossible, depending on where someone falls on the ability spectrum. Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit posits that, “If we use our own abilities as a baseline, we make things that are easy for some people to use, but difficult for everyone else.” Claire used Wingdings to transport a group of designers and coders to a world where they were no longer accommodated for.
I was floored. Her belief in a more purposeful and accessible web deeply aligns with Artefact’s values. To create a better future, it is the responsibility of designers to approach every project with the mindset of accommodating a wide range of ability. By doing so, technology is more usable for everyone.
I invited Claire to conduct a two-day, company-wide workshop at Artefact to help us further strengthen our skills around inclusive design – that is, design that is meant to be accessible to, and used by, as many people possible. I left with three key takeaways on how to approach accessibility and inclusion in my work.
1. Inclusive design makes better products for everyone
Disability
is an inherent part of the human experience. There are more than 53 million people
that live with some sort of disability in the United States. That’s roughly 1 in 10
people. Those numbers rise significantly, to about 1 in 5, when we factor in temporary,
cognitive, or situational disabilities. Design has a major impact on how easily someone can
interact with the tech products that our society is so reliant on. Designing
inclusively doesn’t just affect those with disabilities, either. It broadens the reach of
what we create from a product for many people, to a product for everyone.
“It
could be argued that everyone at some point in their lives will experience some
form of disability – whether through injury, medical condition, or the natural
aging process,” Claire says. “This is particularly important
because technology is increasingly integrated into every form of our lives,
from work and education to entertainment. It’s important we strive to ensure
that people with a range of abilities can participate in these activities.”
This
makes sense from both a business and ethical perspective. By explicitly providing a solution for someone who is hard
of hearing, for example, the same design solution is also indirectly helping
someone in a noisy bar. According to the World Wide Web
Consortium for accessibility on the internet, there
is a direct business case for inclusive design. “Businesses
that integrate accessibility best practices are more likely to be innovative,
inclusive enterprises that reach more people with positive brand messaging that
meets emerging global legal requirements.”
The most interesting value, however, is societal. Designing inclusively creates a more equitable world, where everyone has equal access to products, opportunities, and experiences. There is far less opportunity for backlash, alienation and frustration. We no longer leave people behind.
2. Design for flexibility of use
Designers tend to create tech products for a singular user
experience. In other words, they are focused on a large group of people who
have a similar range of ability. This approach has potential to mount measurable frustration by marginalizing
all other ability groups. Addressing a narrow range of ability limits the equity
that technology should provide. According to a Pew Research Poll, Americans with
a disability are three times less likely to even go online. If design can be
more inclusive, there is an opportunity to increase equity and access to the
internet.
As the grasp of the experience age tightens its
grip on our available senses, it is increasingly important to design systems
that are as flexible as possible. In order to accommodate everyone, there
should no longer be just one way to use products.
How can we improve the technology we create? There are varied
industry perspectives on flexible design in practice. Claire suggests starting any
project with the baseline question, “Is there only one way to interact with a
system, or does it offer some flexibility of use?”
Ronald Mace, a pioneer in
accessibility, led a group at North Carolina State University in creating the Universal Design movement. The
movement and its principles aimed to facilitate the creation of singular,
flexible design solutions to accommodate all users within a variety of spaces,
from architecture to product design.
The common critique of Universal Design is that a singular design solution can’t accommodate the variance and range of ability. Designers should not expect that it is possible for a one-size-fits-all solution. “Inclusive design might not lead to universal designs,” according to designer Kat Holmes. “Universal designs might not involve the participation of excluded communities. Accessible solutions aren’t always designed to consider human diversity or emotional qualities like beauty or dignity. They simply need to provide access. Inclusive design, accessibility, and universal design are important for different reasons and have different strengths. Designers should be familiar with all three.”
3. Start early and POUR
To create products and experiences that are flexible, designers
must address accessibility and inclusion head-on, from the start of a project. Often,
designers view accessibility considerations as features and push them to later
iterations in an effort to stand-up products quickly. That should not be the
case. “[Accessibility] can’t be a pixie dust that you sprinkle on top of
the program and suddenly make it accessible, which is the behavior pattern in
the past,” quips Vince Cerf, a leading
thinker in the accessibility space and known as one of the fathers of the
internet.
As you begin the design process, it is important to note how
people are using the existing systems that are in place. “We should not only focus
on the accessibility of product consumption – consuming things in accessibility
– but production or authorship too,” Claire points
out.
The Designer’s Guide to
Accessibility Research from Google provides an extensive methodology that is extremely
helpful when beginning a new project. It includes tactics such as seeking out assistive technology to use when testing
your design, and ensuring that you get perspectives from a wide swath of people
who are in different places on the ability spectrum. This can help you better identify
potential accessibility interventions and how they would improve your product’s
flexibility and usability for a wider population.
When creating digital solutions, designers should adhere to the
POUR methodology: that the experience is Perceivable, Operable, Usable, and Robust.
POUR is a simplified approach to the extensive Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines, the industry standard for evaluating the accessibility of
digital products. Implementing the POUR principles helps designers create
flexible interaction systems that accommodate a range of inputs and users; can better
parse websites and operating systems; helps people contextualize and understand
content in different ways; and predicts behavior based on patterns used in
other places and on other devices.
WebAIM, a leading accessibility advocacy foundation based out of Utah State University, puts its best: “The POUR principles put people at the center of the process, which, in the end, is the whole reason for even discussing the issues [of accessibility].”
Inclusive design is human-centered design
Technology
has helped people achieve more than we could have ever imagined, and it holds
enormous promise to continue improving the human experience. Yet when we design
technology for a limited range of ability, we leave many behind.
“Some
of the things that are happening in [new technology] around accessibility is
full of experimentation; it’s like the Wild West,” Claire told me. “I get
excited, but I am grounded in the reality that there is a lot of room to
improve with existing technologies.”
Our peers have built an extensive body of inclusive design research and methods to draw from. It’s now our responsibility as designers at the forefront of technology to approach our work as thoughtful advocates of inclusive design. We have the tools, conventions, and patterns to fix it. Let’s get started.
There is a growing awareness that companies should apply the discipline of ethics to creating products and services. Consumers increasingly care about the ethical impact of the brands they choose to support. In fact, research shows that purpose-driven brands that align with consumers’ beliefs outperform those who fail to adapt. In order to compete, businesses need to evaluate the holistic impact of their work, including their sustainability practices, employee compensation and working conditions, and societal effects.
But incorporating ethics into your work isn’t always easy. It requires a fundamental look at your company’s mission, values, and impact. One way that our team at Artefact assesses the impact of our work is by examining it through a set of ethical lenses. In this article, we’ll explore one ethical lens we feel is often overlooked but has great potential to drive innovation and business value: the fairness approach.
What are ethical lenses?
Ethical lenses offer different
ways to look at moral dilemmas. Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for
Applied Ethics outlines five
ethical approaches through which to analyze a
product or service. Informed by philosophical tradition and academic thought,
these ethical frameworks include: the common good approach, the fairness or
justice approach, the rights approach, the utilitarian approach, and the virtue
approach.
The lenses don’t provide a solution or suggest an absolute right from wrong. Instead, they help you surface questions about your products and services that you might not have considered and help change the way you frame a challenge. This is why we think ethical lenses can be a powerful design tool. New innovation stems from looking at a problem from a different angle.
The fairness or justice lens
The fairness lens –
sometimes called the justice lens – evaluates scenarios based on whether they
provide a fair distribution of benefits and burdens across stakeholder groups.
According to the Markkula Center, the fairness lens originated from the
teachings of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who said that, “equals
should be treated equally and unequals unequally.” The fairness lens
addresses moral questions such as: how fair is this action? Are we treating groups
as they should be treated? Is there undue favoritism or unjust discrimination?
In a business context, companies typically consider the impact of their products and services on key stakeholders such as investors, consumers, and those who make and deliver the company’s products and services. It’s intuitive for a business to try to minimize harm to their employees and suppliers, for example, as they are people more likely to fall within a company’s purview. Considering the needs of stakeholders who aren’t part of your value chain takes more deliberate intention. The fairness lens can help you think through your impact on other, possibility forgotten, stakeholders.
The fairness lens in action
How do you apply the fairness lens to your work? We took inspiration from carbon offset programs in the airline industry to demonstrate how to apply this ethical approach. This example takes into consideration an unlikely stakeholder group: the non-user. By thinking about stakeholders more broadly, we demonstrate how you can unlock new forms of value for customers.
1. Make an exhaustive list of your stakeholders and identify the distribution of benefits and burdens created by your business.
When it comes to air
travel, our ability to jump on a plane offers many benefits to the user and
society. It improves quality of life, creates jobs, and results in increased
economic activity. However, it also creates numerous negative externalities
including air, noise, and water pollution. In fact, every
round-trip trans-Atlantic flight emits enough carbon dioxide to melt 30
square feet of Arctic sea ice.
What is more striking is that less than 20 percent of the global population enjoys the benefits of flying, yet everyone on the planet shares in these environmental burdens. Moreover, the effects of climate change will adversely affect the global poor who more commonly inhabit the regions of the world most susceptible to global warming.
2. Identify whether this distribution is fair and why.
Is the group that benefits from your business sharing in the burden? These are subjective questions that will likely require your team to reference your mission statement and values. In the case of airlines, their service has an unequal impact on stakeholder groups: non-users carry the burden created by users.
3. Explore how to correct for a fairer distribution of benefits and burdens.
In 2007, Delta became the first U.S. airline to offer customers an option to offset the carbon emissions incurred from their flight. Delta offers a carbon calculator on their website where customers can determine the environmental impact of their flight and what it would cost to offset the equivalent carbon. Customers can then choose to fund efforts led by the Nature Conservancy to measurably improve the atmosphere.
Carbon offsets are one way to consider the needs of the 80 percent of the world who are airline “non-users” – a majority of whom will never fly on a plane. Other efforts in the industry aim to avoid creating the burden in the first place. Emirates states in their annual sustainability report that reducing carbon emissions is best addressed by investing in state-of-the-art planes. With an average fleet age of 5.3 years, Emirates has one of the most modern, low-emission fleets in the industry.
These initiatives not only have environmental benefits, but also help airlines further strengthen relationships with customers who seek to engage with companies that share their values.
Ethics as innovation
The fairness lens helps
you assess whether your product or service is creating inequities that you
should be aware of. It can jump-start the process to launching new features or
services that not only mitigate harmful effects but also differentiate your
offering in the marketplace.
In the case of commercial air travel, carbon offsets and investing in fuel-efficient planes are just a few ways to create a fairer distribution of burdens. Applying the fairness lens could result in other actions such as airlines using renewables as a fuel source, or rideshare companies requiring the use of electric cars. The possibilities are endless. It’s this bold thinking that excites us, and the fairness lens can show us the way.
