Universal Design In Life And Work

There are groups of people who don’t have the opportunity to use technology on an equal basis as I do. When we start thinking about these groups of people in the design of technology, we can fundamentally enable people to participate in society. If you have access to technology and use it relatively easily, take a step back and think about those groups of people who may not have that same privilege. What would it mean if you weren’t able to use a computer or mobile phone? Transcript available at DrAnthony.Design

I used to think that I wasn’t creative. I recently realized that creativity is not something you’re just born with, creativity is really something we can cultivate and something we can encourage in ourselves and others. One of my favorite class activities is to challenge my students to come up with 30 ideas for using an everyday object in unconventional ways. What is a pen, if it’s not something to write with? We can apply this same approach to our work to open up new solutions and ideas. Full transcript available on Medium.

It's really hard to develop a piece of technology for someone who is outside of your immediate point of reference. It’s really hard to imagine what it might be like. This is why we must collaborate with different groups of people to co-design new technologies. I’ve never, not once, ever met a technology developer young or old that was actively trying to exclude a group of users. But in order to include all users, we must take into account their diverse needs and preferences in creating new technology. Full transcript available on Medium.

I fell into the field of design almost by accident. It was never my intention to study design or to work in the design field. After 15 years of working in design, but never really acknowledging it, I had created websites, databases, and a whole bunch of other technologies and tech businesses but never really considered design as being part of my work. I think that the field of design helps us capture the variety of different decision points that happen whenever we’re creating something new. It’s really about your intentions. What do you intend to do when you set out to try to achieve a goal? Design is really wrapped up in exactly that. What is your goal? What are the decisions you make along the way to achieving that goal? What are the outputs and outcomes that result from that process? Now, I say outputs and outcomes for very specific reason because when we think about outputs we can think about the direct result of a process. What is produced during a process? If we’re creating a website, the output is a website. Outcomes are secondary, broader impacts that occur after your output has been produced. When I think of outcomes, and we go back to the website example, creating a website can be the impact the people who are using it. So, what does that look like? How has their daily life changed? The process of design, as well as those outcomes and outputs, comes down to being very critical and scrutinizing our decisions, the decisions that we make along that process, and trying to understand how our decisions affect outputs and outcomes? Again, let’s go back to the website, if I make a decision on and I make a decision to include a video on that website, the output is that video, embedded in some way on that website. But the outcomes are the ways in which people interact with that video. The decision-making processes that occur along the way of producing that website and that content can significantly impact the experience of the people who use it. I think in technology development, we get hung up a lot on the output side of things. We want a list of requirements, more or less a recipe that we can follow as tech developers and produce an output, and that’s it, end of the story. I think we can take it one step further and really think critically about design and consider those outcomes. What are the experiences of the people who are using this website? We can talk about the same thing in business. If I think about the business development process and I think about the output, the output might be registering your new business, or it might be the business model itself, or it might be the web presence of the business. But the outcome is the impacts of the business on the users, on the people whose lives are affected by your products or services, as well as on society as a whole, as well as on the planet, as well as all the different dimensions that are related to your business. So if I were developing a business model and I wanted to make sure that there’s definitely a market for my service, then I would want to make sure that I interview people who would be my potential customers whether that’s other businesses or consumers themselves. But if I neglect to take into consideration, my suppliers, then the business that I create may not be economically, socially, or environmentally sustainable because I haven’t taken into consideration the entire supply chain and instead just looked at my customers. It’s important when we’re taking design into consideration that we’re not just looking on the output side of things but we’re looking on the outcome side of things as well and that we’re taking design seriously because all of those decisions can affect what we produce and how that changes the world around us. I really think about design not only as the conscious decisions but also the unconscious, the subconscious, decisions that we make. I may not intend to damage the planet when I create my new business.

I’ve worked in the tech sector for a number of years now, and I guess about ten years or so ago, we started talking a lot about disruptive technology and how technology can emerge in society and change things and create massive structural changes to the way we live our lives, the way we organize ourselves, or the way we experience the world around us. And it’s really fashionable to talk about disruptive technology. I think a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of tech innovators look at disruption as being something that you want, that you gravitate towards, almost a value system, you think that technology should be disruptive or the ultimate goal in creating technology is for it to be disruptive. But what that means can vary based on your own personal experience that disruption in your life can cause. It can really be problematic for your ability to live independently and autonomously in the world. I like to think disruption is less about challenging the status quo and more about improving things, making things a little bit better for the people in your lives and the people in our world. We really have to stop and think when we innovate or when we introduce new technologies. We really have to think critically about what that means to disrupt. What it means to change things and what are the consequences, both good and bad. We always fixate on the good. “Oh, this is going to change things because it’s going to make things better for this person or that person” “It’s going to revolutionize the way we do this or that” But we don’t often take a moment, just a beat, and think about the potential negative consequences. What are the risks that are associated with introducing this technology? And really use that risk assessment or that appraisal of the risks and feed that into the way we’ve created those technologies so that we’re limiting the negative impacts of those technologies so that we’re really working to try to create technology that is still doing good but is also preventing harm, preventing damage, or preventing potential negative effects. I think reflecting on the social impact of technology both in negative terms as well as positive terms, is really important to how we approach the tech sector and how we approach technology development. I’m not just talking about jobs. If you look historically, there are so many incidents where a new technology comes in and devastates a job market. It puts a lot of people out of employment or puts a lot of businesses out of business. I’m not just talking about that. That’s a really important component, but the challenge with the job market and with businesses going out of business isn’t necessarily about technology disruption. It’s really a limitation of our educational systems. If our educational systems are focusing on the issues that are important, and the inevitability that technology will disrupt our lives, and especially employment, then the educational sector should really focus on lifelong learning and enabling people to continually upskill themselves throughout their life. So students are not just learning a whole bunch of stuff at the beginning of their life and then basically stop learning after that, but really, finding places in somebody’s life where they can continually upskill and develop their professional capacities. That will deal with the whole unemployment issue, so that when disruptive technologies are introduced, it’s not matter of laying off a whole bunch of people but reskilling them and finding ways of bringing them back into the job market. I think that’s a really important role for government in education. But it’s not necessarily something that I worry too much about when it comes to this issue of disruption. For the jobs that I’ve had, disruption in terms of technology development has had a very limited effect on me. I’ve been lucky that I kind of came up in the information society, digital revolution, and all that stuff.

Persuasion is a really important form of communication. We often talk about persuasion as, in the words of my father-in-law, being a “schlimer”, which basically comes down to someone who tries to persuade someone to do a certain thing or to think a certain way or to kind of respond in a certain way, but they do it insincerely. When we think about persuasion that’s the kind of mindset we have. We think about these people who are trying to give you the “hard sell”, who are overzealous in trying to convince you of something. I think persuasion is something we do every day. We are always trying to persuade each other to do things or to act a certain way or to think a certain way or to just feel something. I’m persuading you right now. I’m doing my best to persuade you that this content might be important in your life and that there’s something here that you can use, that you can take and act on in some significant way. I think about persuasion in a very different way than what I imagine is conventional thought. That’s because I do a lot of public presentations. When you’re presenting in public, whether as a teacher or presenting at a conference or wherever, in front of a large group or small group of people, I often think about how I can persuade them to listen to take the time to not check their email, to not look at their computers, to not look at their phone, and persuade them that what I’m saying actually might matter to them and that there’s something of value in what I’m saying. In order to do that, I don’t just launch into the most nitty-gritty aspect of what I’m talking about. I take a few moments at the beginning of my whole spiel to think about the value systems that we have in common, that my audience has in common with me. What are the things that we are aligned on? Where are we thinking in the same way? If you use that foundation for how you approach the rest of the presentation, then the act of persuasion becomes a lot easier. It becomes a lot easier just for them to absorb what you’re saying because they’ve already tuned into your frequency. You’ve already given them a foundation to build on before you get to the heart of the matter. So they’ve already kind of gone “Yes, I agree with whatever you’ve said”, “I like whatever you’ve said”, “Now, let’s figure out what we do together next”. It’s about bringing your audience together. Whenever I start a presentation, I often started with the words, “I believe”. Then I fill in the blank and so I’ll say something like “I believe in equality”. That’s something most people can gather around and say “yes we believe in equality too”. That gives me the chance to say “I believe in equality”, that’s something I know you believe too, now we can take that forward. Then I will talk about how my belief in equality relates to technology or how that relates to the world that we live in. Starting off with a basic statement about a value system or a principle that you believe, that is a part of who you are or part of the way you think about the issue, can set a good foundation, a good framework for being more persuasive once you get into the nitty-gritty. Whenever you get into the actual content of what you want to talk about. I think what we have to do whenever we’re trying to persuade someone is to start from a common value system. What do we have in common? What do you believe? What do I believe? Where are there touchpoints? Let’s start there. Then we can move into more practicalities, we can move into more ways of achieving that shared vision, that shared ambition. The next time you try to persuade someone, whether you’re presenting in public or you’re just trying to talk your friend or family member into doing something, start with what you believe. What is it that matters to you about this issue? Then see if you can find that common goal, that common identity before you move straight into what you actually want to do.

We’re taught at a very young age to be responsible. When we see people who are being responsible, we try to imitate them, and we’re told by the people who are taking care of us to be more responsible, to take responsibility. 

For me, responsibility comes down to being able to see a need and take action. Responsibility is seeing that this action needs to be taken, that this issue needs to be resolved and taking action towards resolving that issue or engaging in that activity. That’s a very basic way of understanding responsibility.

On the other side of things is irresponsibility. We’re often condemned for being irresponsible or it’s used as a very negative way of demeaning someone by calling them irresponsible. “You’re irresponsible.” “You’re not taking responsibility.” I’m sure we’ve all heard that at some point in time in our life. What that means is seeing a need but then not doing anything about it, being completely inactive or even ignoring that need, ignoring it to the detriment of the world around you, the people around you, or any other aspect of life.

I want to kind of throw a new spin on the way we think about our responsibility. That is to recognize that there are times where the right, the moral, the ethical decision to make is to intentionally be irresponsible, to see a need and not avoid it, but to leave it unmet.

It’s a real challenge for a lot of people because we have to retrain the way we’ve looked at responsibility our whole lives, and when we see a need, we have to not ignore it, but to stay present and stay engaged with it, and at the same time refrain or hold back from trying to meet that need, from actually taking action to meet that need.

I think what all that comes down to is that there are really complex challenges in our world. There are complex challenges in society, and oftentimes we’ll see that there’s a problem and our intervention can create more problems than it fixes. Again, this is not about ignoring the problem. You still acknowledge the problem, you still stay present, and you stay engaged with the problem, but you don’t act to try to resolve that problem or meet that need in any significant way. 

Again this kind of goes against a lot of our upbringing and a lot of the ways we’ve been raised by our parents and everyone else. Especially in schools, we talk so much about taking responsibility and being active and engaged. This is critically important, but I’m going to throw a new way of thinking about this at you. There are times in your life where acting irresponsible is absolutely the right way to go.

One way of approaching this is just through the idea of self-care. There are many needs in our lives that we face, that we try to fulfill, and when meeting those needs overwhelms our ability and our own health and welfare, then those needs are better left unfulfilled in the name of preserving our own health and embodiment and welfare. 

I think this is really really important because especially people who are in the early stages of their career, they look at all the needs around them, they look at all the responsibilities that they are taking on and they become overwhelmed because they don’t know how to meet those needs effectively. What it comes down to is not ignoring responsibility, but not engaging with that responsibility, not engaging with the need that you observe or that you see in the world. “How do you think about responsibility in your own lives?” “Have there been times that you’ve had to deliberately be irresponsible in order to take care of yourself, in order to take care of those around you?” 

I think intentionally observing the need to be responsible and not taking responsibility can be an incredible value, an incredible virtue, and an incredible ability.

There is this myth of the self-made person, someone who strikes out on their own and through thick and thin is able to achieve greatness or achieve their ambitions and goals in life. But what I think about whenever I’m confronted with this way of thinking is a famous poem, and I’ll paraphrase here, no one is an island unto themselves. What that means to me is basically that we are all interdependent, that we depend on one another for our needs, whether that’s depending on the people who work at your grocery store to provide groceries that are safe and healthy or depending on a loved one for basic care and compassion.

We have this kind of duality or polarity when it comes to how we see each other and how we see ourselves. On one extreme there is this idea that you have to strike out on your own and you have to make your own way. On the other end is that we’re all interdependent and maybe it’s not about how much work you put into something but actually how much support that you have and how much of a social network you have.

What I want to get down to is this idea of opportunity. Opportunity used to be about making rules that somehow treat people fairly. It was about making a rule that says you can’t treat this person in this way or this person in that way. So it’s about fairness. I think that’s a good way of starting to think about opportunity, but I don’t think it’s it’s gone far enough. I think we can continue to evolve the way we understand what opportunity means, what opportunity means for each other, and for our own lives.

A more conventional, more state-of-the-art, and even a more scientific way of looking at opportunity is to look at the conditions that allow someone to achieve success, the conditions that provide support, foundation that allows someone to achieve success in whatever aspect of life they want to pursue.

It reminds me of another saying, that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and what that means is that nobody has started from a blank slate. We’re all building off of what previous generations have done and the opportunities other people have enabled us to have. I think this is a really important thing to recognize right off the bat.

When I talk about opportunity with my students a lot of times I get this kind of attitude of “so that means everybody in the class gets an A, right?”. But opportunity is about ensuring that everybody has a fair chance. No, it’s not about giving everybody an A. It’s not about everyone getting the same stuff or the same things. It’s about ensuring that everyone has an equal chance of successfully getting an A. It’s about making sure that someone who starts at “point A” and someone else who starts at “point B” can both arrive at their destination with a reasonable expectation of success.

Opportunity is an important and complex idea and I want to pick this apart in a little bit more detail later. But I want you to think about who has given you opportunities in your life. How have those opportunities come about? Have they been because of the places you’ve lived? Have they been because of the things you’ve done? I don’t want to diminish your efforts if you’ve spent your life pursuing an objective and really grinding it out. That’s awesome. That’s what life is all about. But it’s not only about that. It’s about that duality. We work hard to achieve our goals, but also we’ve been giving a foundation whether that’s by our parents or the place that we live or anything else, We’ve been given a foundation that’ll allow us to thrive and succeed.