Yet, this is what happens over and over again. We see it at conferences, when those design leaders release books, and on

And at some point, we also have to face the elephant in the atelier — the lack of anything resembling consistent standards industry-wide. No one wants to take this behemoth on, understandably. Discussions regarding standards usually delve into certifications for practitioners or accreditation for courses and schools that inevitably smack face-first into the proprietary way design methodology is taught and the reality that certain entities want to brand and own approaches instead of freely contributing to a larger body of industry knowledge that continuously evolves. We need a consistent, tried and true resource of processes and methods fully vetted by testing in actual design practice with complex, real-world problems to be used as a complement to very solid instruction in critical analysis to consider ourselves a mature, professional field. As it is now, a designer who is aspiring to learn as much as they can is bombarded by constant and often contradictory advice from every direction. I don’t blame them for not knowing what to believe or what to practice.

Accessibility in the broadest sense is the goal to ensure that products support a user’s needed accommodations and preferences. It is outcome-focused and often defined by specific standards, whereas inclusive design is process-oriented and considered throughout the design lifecycle from day one. A fully inclusive process should lead to fully accessible products, but just accounting and designing for accessibility does not mean your design is fully inclusive.

We can start by being brave and open to having challenging conversations. And yes, I know what I’m asking here. If you’ve ever tried to engage in discussions about these topics with other designers, particularly design leaders with a lot of influence, then you know how soul-crushing these conversations can be when they go wrong. This is especially difficult for designers from underrepresented backgrounds who feel less empowered to speak up. Political polarization and pandemic stress have heightened the differences between us, making bridging the gap that much more difficult yet critical. But it’s important that we still try. Doubly important for those who have an easier time of it to gracefully make space in these conversations for those who do not.

At least not in any formal “designer’s code” kind of way. It is up to individuals to make highly subjective, ethical decisions in the moment, often without leadership support and almost always by putting their employment status at risk.

And we can’t continue to view candor about what’s not working as some sort of threat that will diminish our industry’s standing. We have to stop being apologists for the dysfunctional way we work. There’s this underlying idea that if we air our dirty laundry, businesses will decide that we don’t actually know what we’re doing and stop hiring us. Let me disabuse you of that notion. Business folks don’t actually care what designers talk about amongst themselves. I mean, let’s be honest, they barely listen to us even when we’re speaking directly to them.

Here’s another thing we can do every day — amplify those who are saying the right and true things, especially women and BIPOC. Take, for example, this tweet thread I came across by Karen VanHouten:

I read that thread and found it to be one of the most honest and true things I’ve ever read about the work we do in a long time. And yet, it got minimal traction because the algorithm isn’t built to bring you the good, only what’s popular. But these are the types of posts that everyone should get to read. So when you stumble across contributions like this from people you don’t know, amplify them, share them, and follow the person. This is how the algorithms that drive what you see get better.

We wield this tremendous power and still have not yet incorporated ethics as required coursework for foundational design education, nor have we set any standards for how to do our work in a consistently ethical way. With the incredible rising potential for misuse of design applied newer technologies, such as those driven by AI/ML, the urgency becomes evident. We can no longer afford to keep pretending that we don’t have an obligation to do much, much more than we’re doing now.

Inclusive Design is design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference. — Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD U in Toronto

As creatives responsible for mass communication and millions of audience impressions per minute, we’ve got a lot of power to make an impact. For better or worse, we creative types deeply affect the way information is interpreted, how brands and products are consumed, and the ways that people experience the mediated and artificial world.

And here’s something we can also do right now to make this easier for all of us; stop deifying “thought leaders” who are doing a craptastic job of leading, especially when they are being bullies. If you see an established leader engaging in gaslighting, being abusive, shutting down a conversation, or using their following to attack someone who simply disagrees with them — call them out. If that doesn’t result in their taking responsibility, stop following them, stop encouraging them by buying their courses and books, don’t attend conferences where they speak, and block or mute them online. We not only have to encourage high standards for our work but also how we interact with each other. No one should get a pass just because of their career accomplishments. Besides, there are enough great and selfless leaders in this space to follow that we can more than afford to shed the bad ones without missing a beat.

We’ve normalized this. The business says anyone outside the “primary” set of personas is an edge case. So those representing other demographics — race, age, ethnicity, and ability — well, they fall off the radar to hopefully be included in later releases. I even put this topic last on my list to drive home that point. These issues were not even on the radar for far too many of you before this last incredibly tumultuous year. This is why the “percentage of potential users” is a shit way to prioritize features when building software. We can no longer allow ourselves to determine whether to make a design fully inclusive based solely on the number of people affected.

Inclusive Design should just be Design. Careful consideration of all the various types of folks who will use what we make and accommodating their needs should already be how we work on every project, every time. But it’s not. Why isn’t it? Because despite how much we talk about it, most of us have no clue how to really conduct the necessary activities and methods in a way that will fit into our existing workflows, nor are we being encouraged to find out by those we work for (and remember, we’ve been conditioned not to fail — see point #4). So we defer learning how to incorporate it into practice for another time on another day, just as we do with ethics. Every time we do this, what we’re really saying is that it’s fine to release a product that may not work for a significant portion of the population — real people who are already being shortchanged daily by the design of everyday things. It’s well beyond time that we stop letting this be the norm.

So what now, you ask? How do we address these issues? Well, the first step is agreeing that they are, in fact, issues. Then it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do something.

http://molos.bodasturias.com/jph/v-ideos-rungsted-v-esbjerg-energy-v-da-da-1kxz-24.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/Video-stavanger-oilers-v-valerengens-v-no-no-1xlp-22.php

http://old.cocir.org/media/cdz/videos-leones-del-caracas-v-cardenales-de-lara-v-es-vn-1phy-21.php

http://molos.bodasturias.com/jph/v-ideos-rungsted-v-esbjerg-energy-v-da-da-1pbi-19.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/video-stavanger-oilers-v-valerengens-v-no-no-1gip-4.php

http://molos.bodasturias.com/jph/Video-Odense-Bulldogs-Frederikshavn-White-Hawks-v-en-gb-1kfx-.php

http://old.cocir.org/media/cdz/Video-Bravos-de-Margarita-Caribes-de-Anzoategui-v-en-gb-1foy30122020-.php

http://molos.bodasturias.com/jph/videos-Odense-Bulldogs-Frederikshavn-White-Hawks-v-en-gb-1jxs-4.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/videos-stavanger-oilers-v-valerengens-v-no-no-1njo-25.php

http://old.cocir.org/media/cdz/videos-Bravos-de-Margarita-Caribes-de-Anzoategui-v-en-gb-1cit-4.php

today very well. We provision 21 micro-services in an integrated environment under 8 minutes today on Kubernetes. Any developer can use our home-grown tool to do this. We also provision a subset of this environment for every pull request created for any of these 21 micro-services. The entire test-cycle (provisioning the environment and running tests) takes under 12 minutes. It might feel like awfully long but it prevents us from shipping bad changes in the architectural mess we are currently in.