Thesis is quite a journey.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a solid thesis post, so here goes.

Since the thesis retreat, my head has been in a few different places. I’ve proved to myself, beyond a reasonable doubt, that turning up the volume on marginalized perspectives in design is what I need to be working on. I’ve also spent time with the fact that this is a wicked problem, and that I’m now in for what will likely be a very bumpy and intensely personal road from here.

Carving out a small part of this issue to work on for the next few months is going to be scary, and difficult. At the moment, it feels like whenever I focus in on something I can come up with a laundry list of reasons not to do it, or why that particular issue is impossible to overcome in such a small time. It’s an interesting form of paralysis that’s a fun mix of thesis stress, cultural conditioning, and plain old procrastination. 

Over the last week I’ve been thinking a lot about implicit bias, and was planning on creating a few interactions that express the biases we all hold. One idea was switching the gender of names in several news articles to see if it had any impact on the reader. 

My rationale went something like this:

  1. To make better products, we need more diverse perspectives in design.
  2. 80% of the people who make websites are male, 87% are white*.
  3. People have implicit bias, which impacts how they view others.
  4. People like to hire people like them.
  5. If I can teach people about bias, I can show them how deeply ingrained certain stereotypes are.
  6. If I can teach ways to overcome bias, then maybe I can change design processes + hiring practices. 

Then, I went out for dinner with my good friend Jerri Chou. We talked about my thesis, where it came from, where I see it going. I told her about my plans to make implicit bias more visible, then we got to talking about the opportunity of diverse perspectives. This is something I keep coming back to - If most of our environment (physical + digital) has been designed from a mainstream perspective, what if we shift that view slightly, does it mean that we can rebuild everything? No doubt there are some serious opportunities there, $$ and otherwise. 

We discussed an immensely wide range of ‘women-related’ (I need a better phrase than that) topics + issues throughout the evening. Jerri wasn’t all that convinced by my implicit bias focus, and suggested that my project needs to be more personal than that - it needs to solve a problem that I have, fix something that bothers me, help me overcome deeper issues, or reach personal goals. 

She’s totally right. I knew that the implicit bias exercises would be interesting, and definitely spark some good conversation. However, this comes with a negative slant - my work would be focused at the ‘mainstream’ designer, saying, “Your perspective is wrong, now here’s how to fix you”. This isn’t what I want. 

What I want to say is: “Your perspective is right, now here’s the opportunity” and say it to the large segment of the population that doesn’t hear it enough. Perhaps the best way to do that is to follow Jerri’s advice, acknowledge that I’m part of that large segment, and say it to myself.

I like to refer to the anecdotal story of the Apple Store glass stairs. While visually appealing one unforeseen consequence to their design was the large groups of strange men that spend hours each day sitting under them looking up. As a women, the first time I saw them I thought ‘thank god I’m not wearing a skirt today.’

Such considerations were not taken in designing these stairs, I think it’s probable, if not easily predictable, that in a few years we will see such holes in the design of the web.

In which I answer all of the questions, Sara J Chipps

Source: sarajchipps.com

Thesis retreat

This weekend I embarked on a thesis retreat with about half of my class. Friday afternoon, we packed up Min’s car and headed upstate to a house (pictured above) that was just outside of Hudson, NY. Once there, we proceeded to eat, drink, read, talk, and play for the next 48 hours. It was fantastic!

Surprisingly, we all managed to get some solid work done on thesis. Something about the country air + no internet really makes you focus. I got through a lot of reading, and figured out my next line of inquiry. 

Last week, I discovered that the term ‘Feminist HCI’ exists and was coined 2 years ago by Shaowen Bardzell. In the same year, there was also a workshop and a special edition of Interacting with Computers in the same vein - both organized by Bardzell and Elizabeth Churchill. Unfortunately, since I go to design school, pulling these ‘science’ papers isn’t quite as easy as I expected. I’m working on it though. (Hit me up if you have a login to Science Direct.)

Fortunately, the extended abstract from the workshop is online. Thursday afternoon, as my mac n cheese was in the oven, I combed through the abstract’s references and downloaded a few papers to read over the weekend. Though I read through 7 or so, these 3 really stood out:

Sugared puppy-dog tales, Elizabeth Churchill (Interactions, 2010 - pay wall)

REALizing our messy future, Woodrow Winchester (Interactions, 2010 - pay wall)
A response to Churchill’s piece, Winchester brings in his experience working on HIV interventions and discusses the need for design lenses.

Made in Patriarchy, Cheryl Buckley  (MIT Press, 1986) 
Buckely’s excellent piece examines the pariarchal context within which design history frames female interaction with design as practitioners, theorists, consumers, historians, and as objects of representation.

Overall, I was struck by how eloquently others have said what I was trying to say in my last blog post. Essentially, they all very strongly make the case to bring a critical perspective to design. 

Churchill’s article sums it up best:

‘Designers are not passive bystanders in the production, reproduction, reinforcing, or challenging of cultural values. We actively create artifacts and experiences. We design products with implicit or explicit assumptions about how products will be used and by whom. We mentally simulate the product user who is part of an imagined story of the product in use—these imaginary people are drawn from our everyday lives and usually have a gender, perhaps a shape, size, age and ethnicity. Thus we embed imagined, gendered others into our designs, inadvertently reproducing cultural norms because they seem so “natural.” And so in a chain of reification and reproduction, products are wired in subtle ways that reflect and reinforce existing cultural assumptions.’

She goes on to illustrate where these assumptions have caused serious problems in the design of products, both digital and physical. The most ghastly of her examples are airbags. The first generation of the safety device seriously injured and killed (by decapitation!) many upon its release. This was due to the fact that airbags were initially calibrated for men of average weight and height. 

It is incredible to me that a group of talented engineers could somehow forget that women and children are smaller than men, and thus could be greivously injured by their invention. It really speaks to the need to be aware of the perspectives we bring to the table.

I’ve finished the weekend feeling more excited than ever about my thesis. There is a real, if not dire, need to incorporate a critical perspective into our work as interaction designers. My next big question is how? How can I help to bridge the gap between academic theory and professional reality?

Good ideas are not everywhere.

Startupville

Strange as it sounds, this was a somewhat surprising insight. At grad school we’re constantly surrounded by concepting sessions, thesis ideas, and astounding guest lectures; so much so that I tend to forget that theres a lot of half-baked work out there.

The startup mania that happens at SXSW was a rather amazing reminder of how many undercooked or just downright creepy ideas become a reality. On the first night, Prachi and I went to a few sites for the Startup Crawl. We were excited to see new ideas and speak to people about their startup experience, but instead we found offices with beer pong, meeting rooms named after sushi, and services that hold on to your social network activity…for your employer. Each to their own, but we didn’t find there was much to construct conversation around. The abundance of bad office furniture didn’t help either. 

A couple of nights later, I had the opportunity to meet a few new people over dinner. One person I spoke to had launched a startup just the day before, upon arrival to SXSW. He told me, proudly, about how they’d conceived and built their service in a very compressed time frame, I suspect without much user testing and iteration or even testing if there was any demand for the product in the first place. 

Believe it or not, but I found this all really inspiring. It gave me renewed faith in my work and my ideas. Thanks to my time at SVAIXD, it seems obvious to me that you must consider and design for the people at the center of a product or service, and not for the sake of building the product itself, but I realized that’s an insight not everyone has.

Toilet paper problems

I’m working on a project for my Physical Computing midterm, its called ‘tp minder’. Guri, Minnie, and I were brainstorming for small problems to solve and focused in on toilet paper notification. At the time, we though this would be a fantastically fun and silly project - a system that lets you know there’s no toilet paper in a bathroom stall. 

During our presentation the question was asked, “Who’s suffered from this problem before - being stranded in a bathroom with no paper?”. 9 out of the 10 women raised their hands. It was then I realized, that this isn’t actually a small problem, but an indicator of something much bigger. 

Think about it - using the numbers in this unscientific survey, roughly 90% of women in toilet paper using countries have endured the uncomfortable embarrassment of this problem. Thats 140M people in the US alone. Think thats not enough? Think of the time it takes to check toilet paper levels of every single stall of a movie theater or stadium bathroom.  

Why hasn’t this problem been solved? My guess is that the ‘problem solvers’ of our world have been predominantly male for a long time. I’m not saying they didn’t want to solve this problem, but more that this slice of life isn’t lived by them. I’ve learned from recent conversations that when a dude needs to use toilet paper - he’s damn sure its there.

I’ve been thinking of our project as just scratching the surface of something much bigger. We live in a world dominated by products made through a masculine view of the world. What happens if we look through a feminine lens? I have a feeling we’ll find more interesting problems to solve than toilet paper dispensing.