The Designer's Share of the Problem

So that's the title of my upcoming talk in Oslo next week. I've had a hard time scaling down my ideas into something digestible, because I'm thinking too broadly about what I want to discuss.

The original talk centers around the idea of harm being embedded into everyday experiences and how designers shape that through their work, practices, methods and mediums. The main takeaway from this adaption of the talk away from this idea of "consequence design" and focused more on the "designers share of the problem" is a bit of a speculative design piece where we reimagine what UIs are able to communicate.

So many design talks alienate their audiences because they're so focused on structural changes that no one can go home and implement. Even if I wanted to, most talks involve asking someone to do something big like quit their job or tell their boss to change the way they do business. This isn't realistic for most people and even if it were, it's not really a good idea.

The path to long-term change involves making the choices we're able to impact at our own level, in our own time and affecting the orbit that we're most involved in. My goal is to make people aware of the ways that our lens is impacted by fallacies we've been reared with, or simply by the narrow lens of our own networks. 

I think where I struggle is how much of other people's information to bring to the conversation. There are a ton of quotes about these topics generally. Also, I'm tying to a thread between the other kinds of design and service design, which I argue isn't built for resilience and that we need an entirely new lens from which to design, measure, and consume services that incorporates policy design into it. Many of the problems with services stem from policy failures, because service designers aren't usually able to impact policy and thus, it's an ineffective cycle.

I'm not sure this writing got me further than where I was, but I'll come up with something and share it once it's done.