Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chelsea Hassler

We posed this question to a room of 80 designers following Arturo Perez’s talk about design’s unintended consequences at our last Evenings at the Loft event in Los Angeles.

In our age of uncertainty and rapid socio-technological transformation, the salvo of issues to facing us can feel overwhelming: California is on fire, Trump’s President, the internet is for sale, and Dennis Rodman is the guy standing between us and nuclear war. What can designers, with our sticky notes and ontological frameworks, do about it? Or do to at least feel a little better about it?

Design is by nature an optimistic discipline. At it’s core is the belief that things can be made better through consideration and effort— even if those things are small and unimportant, like a chair or a chatbot. And as it so happens, technology and design are increasingly responsible for shaping our world in big, and often unintended ways.

That means that we, as designers, have an obligation to widen our field of consideration beyond ROI, clicks and attention metrics, and consider the far-reaching ramifications our products are having socio-politically, interpersonally and economically. As the proportion of people who understand the nuances of how technology works shrinks in relationship to the complexity of our innovations, an undeniable onus falls on designers to educate and protect the people using our products(sometimes from themselves).

We need to move beyond gaining a peripheral awareness of the externalities our products create, and actively consider how we apply design thinking to pervasive societal issues in an effort to carve out havens of progress and responsibility in our communities.

When we posited the question: “What should design be concerned with in 2018” we got a broad smattering of answers and the moderated conversation got heated, to say the least. To frame the discussion we handed out gigantic post-its and participants each chose their three chief topics. We all posted them up on a wall and created a 25ft x 8 ft affinity map. Here’s what it looked like:

80 LA-based designers say these are the top opportunities, concerns and responsibilities facing us in the new year:

1. Inclusion & Diversity within the Tech Community

2. Creating Time & Space for Mindfulness

3. Protecting Personal Information & Privacy

4. Fostering In Person Community & Social Interaction

5. Helping to Protect Our Environment

6. Homelessness & Income Disparity

7. The need for Political Organizing

The feedback we got reflected people who felt somewhat lonely, disconnected, and uncertain about how to approach these big problems.

During the discussion, the group had a tense moment as a social justice organizer berated several people for not knowing the name of the Native American tribe who historically resided in the Los Angeles region, and accused our industry of being out of touch, money hungry and insular. This type of scorn is often directed at the tech community, and to a large extent it is deserved. Her words came at the right time as we were there to discuss ways in which our industry, and we as individuals, can uplift our communities rather than exclude them as “technocapitalism” thrives.

So, recognizing our lowly starting point, where do we go from here? How do we make meaningful change in the direction of our desires?

A few baby steps are dialogue, planning and community organizing. In that spirit, we are asking the community to continue the conversation we started.

To do that, we ask you choose the topic closest to your heart and leave it in the comments along with your email. We will then arrange for a Slack channel to be set up to connect those with similar interests. This will become an ongoing forum for sharing ideas, resources and planning. We can’t wait to see what it evolves into! We also intend to keep the ball rolling at our next Evenings at the Loft event. Please join us!

All photos courtesy of Jo Ash Sakula

WHAT SHOULD DESIGN BE CONCERNED WITH IN 2018? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

WHAT SHOULD DESIGN BE CONCERNED WITH IN 2018?

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles