Dan Mall on defining “good” design

if we really are going to have the impact on the world that i think design can have we have to be able to listen to more folks than we're than we're used to listening to [Music] so today we're speaking with dan maul founder and ceo of design collaborative super friendly thanks for joining us dan oh my pleasure thanks for having me good to see you again dan yeah i like lives it's nice to see your faces now that we can't be in the same room together at least we're going to talk about how design and inequity go together or how we can actually make things a little better in the world so i'm going to start off with a question about bad design uh there when i say bad design and we talk about inclusion and injustice do you think there are things that come to mind for you that constitute bad design and do those tie it all to what you would consider sort of traditional bad design in technology yeah interesting um i think that we should define design so maybe we'll start there and my favorite definition of it there's a lot of them out there my favorite comes from my friend jared spool who says design is the rendering of intent and i think that's important to the idea of understanding good design and bad design is that a lot of it centers around what is this supposed to do you know what am what is that what did the designer intend for you to do with this thing or this object or this technology or things like that and so when i think about bad design in the world i think about either a thing that is intended to do something that it is not able to do or something that is actually intended to do harm so those are you know and there's a broad range within the you know within that scope but so to me bad design is about you know can someone actually use this the way that it's intended assuming the designer was actually doing something make trying to make something really good can people actually use it in the way that they intended to so it sounds like obviously the designer has a lot of control over this aspect of the work absolutely and i think you know some of that is is a little bit self-fulfilling in that when we are designing things we have to kind of admit that we have control over or we'd like to admit as designers that we have control over the thing otherwise it feels a little bit i don't know needless or something so the idea that i'm trying to make something for someone else to use that i should i should take care and how i'm making that i think is kind of crucial to the to the discipline of design and so then if we take that as our definition for design can you think of what sort of constitutes bad design when we're talking about inclusion and justice uh i can i'll share maybe the one of the more obvious examples around exclusion which is the idea that if someone is trying to enter a building right so there's a lot lots of design that goes into entering a building doors handles stairs ramps things like that and a lot of a lot of entrances are designed for a particular type of person it's usually a person who has full motor control of their arms and legs usually someone who can walk usually someone who can see and can hear and then you know we see a lot of this where you know ramps for people in wheelchairs are around the side of the building you have to go in the service entrance in order to get in the building you know that's maybe the one of the more obvious ones where the designer may not have been trying to exclude people but maybe they just weren't thinking about them as intently as they were thinking about a different archetype and so people get left out because of that and so i think you know that's that's one of the more obvious examples that come to mind that get discussed a lot is really that's bad design if you're trying to let people into a building and you're not trying to leave people out and you accidentally did even though it wasn't your intention it still counts as bad design that's really interesting and when we shift online i always think about how designers don't consider where everyone's coming from especially with access to online systems i've heard uh various people say you know to get services even in municipalities sometimes online you need to enter an address um if you're homeless obviously there's there's a real limitation there if you run into things like that with online systems all the time same thing with you know i need to um deposit money somewhere well not everyone has a bank account and so what do you do then you're stuck now and so it creates this cycle of systemic exclusion you know in a way that again a lot of that is not intended uh by the designers and then some some of them are and and some of them are somewhere in the middle where they didn't intend to do that but they didn't just really think as hard about about those things as maybe they should have so i kind of want to ask the flip side to this question that um you're getting at with regard to to you know how design can exclude right so i think what i'm hearing you say is there's a lot of examples we i'm sure we can generate more right where we're not thinking about how a decision might be exclusionary or might marginalize somebody or might diminish somebody's experience right is is a problem um and sounds like you're saying one thing to do is to anticipate you know those those things and kind of prevent them and think about okay how can we make sure that we're not excluding but i'm just curious sort of another way to think about it if your goal is to you know advance equity and you know advance inclusion broadly are there ways that you can sort of not just prevent exclusion but harness you know the power of design to um you know to to meet that goal right to advance um to advance inclusion yeah absolutely one of the things that i love about being a designer and this is why i continue to love it is that it gives me the ability to learn a lot of things that i wouldn't have had a chance to learn otherwise so you know i've worked with companies that are that specialize in marine biology and so i as a designer now have to learn about marine biology in order to do a good job in helping them and so i think part of a designer skill set is is some amount of empathy right some amount of being able to say okay let me act as if i was in the shoes of the user i'm designing for the person i'm designing for and so there's there's a lot of that that's kind of built into the discipline of design where designers kind of have to adopt a mantle of someone that they are not um however one of the things that we're seeing a lot in society especially with tech today is that some designers just don't have the ability to have the empathy for certain people who they just don't have any experience with and i think that what i love about what's what's being discussed in the last decade or so in the idea of inclusive design is not just about okay designers try to put yourself in that shoes but actually to include people from the demographic that you're trying to serve in the design process so if i'm trying to serve you know for example i have two legs and can walk on those two legs if i'm trying to create something for people who can't walk there's only so only so so much amount of empathy that i'm gonna be able to have i think i as much as i try and so instead maybe i should talk to people who can't walk maybe i should talk to people who have different abilities than i do in order to be able to to understand their experience and i think that's where a lot of psych psychology fields like ethnography and behavioral science and things like that come into play where you know talking to people is a good idea observing them watching them watching them you know go out go throughout their day i think a lot of that gives us insight into things that we wouldn't know otherwise as designers and so i think including people in including people that you're trying to serve in the actual process of design is becoming more and more popular in the field of design and i love that idea that we are we're just saying like there is a limit to our knowledge and so instead let's be humble about it and let's talk to people who we're trying to serve so that we really can serve them best do you have advice for maybe younger designers who are just thinking about inclusive design the idea that you are able to know where your blind spots are may be difficult for people so you know something may be very obvious where you may have a blind spot but for other designers you may have to actually think about you know where are my blind spots any advice for them how to think about that yeah i mean it's a tough thing to do it's a tough thing to think about you know where are my blind spots because it requires humility it requires self-awareness and you know not to not to be over generalizing here but um sometimes that doesn't come with youth so you know when you're a young designer or a new designer or a you know a budding designer you don't have a lot of that and a lot of people got into design myself included just to be able to make cool stuff and i think that there's there's there should be space for that too so what i suggest to young designers like do as much design as you can get that part out of your system get the fidelity get the your ability to stop fighting your tools whether that's you know pen and ink or it's a computer or it's photoshop or whatever those things are get that fidelity out as quickly as you can you know put in the hours to do that and then start to round that out with you know how do you talk to people how do you understand more things than just what you're designing is this really cool is this something that i'm proud of i think that's a that's a big part of design but i think design is larger i think design has a larger responsibility and when i work with younger designers or newer designers you know one of the things that i tell them is the skills that you have in designing an interface you know for for people to submit a form those are the same skills that it takes to redesign the way that insurance works in our country you know it's the same kind of thought process very different execution very different scale but those are the same kind of skills that you employ so i think it's practice if you think about it as practice in order to get to do something larger or something that's more of your calling or something that you know you're going to do over the course of your life you know those are practiced in sitting in front of your computer and drawing things that look cool so i like to encourage that but i like to to try to remind younger designers and newer designers there's more to design than this this is a good stepping stone into something else that you might be able to have a larger impact with if that's important to you i was really um kind of pondering the the building example that you gave right of okay you need to design access you know we often see access that's sort of badly designed for wheelchair users etc um and so and then you know talking about forms you know and it it struck me that there's i wonder if there's a tension sometimes between you're trying to design for the needs of people who are going to you know use a product or use an online service but um you know often i would imagine those ultimate you know those end users are not necessarily the people that are paying you to create the design i'm just curious you know when you're sort of not early in your career or maybe you know even then but as you have the ability to kind of navigate those tensions and maybe push for something that's more inclusive how do you um how do you manage that i found that when you cater to the audience that is less served a lot of times that ends up helping everyone and ends up helping everyone more so a famous example of this is there is a staircase i forget where it is and it's a set of stairs if you look at it from an aerial view it's a set of stairs but built into the stairs is kind of this winding ramp so if you are in a device that is you know if you are in a wheelchair or if you're in a scooter or if you have crutches um or if you can walk you can you can walk up the stairs or you can use the ramp even if you can walk or and it is a beautiful design and so it is uh from an aesthetic point of view it's lovely from a functional point of view it is excellent and useful to everyone and now that you know there's different schools of thoughts in it where you know the grade of the slope might be a little bit too too steep you know those are all things that are solvable but i think what it takes is the mindset of the designer to say is there a solution that works best for everyone is there a solution that doesn't leave anyone else out and i that's the thing that i see designers not doing in the in their process and i think that designers see it as oh no i don't want to compromise my vision you know just for this and you know we see it on our teams all the time we just happened this happened a couple of weeks ago where one of one of our designers was kind of talking about some of our work in that way well oh no we're not catering to blind users on that site you know there's we don't have a big blind audience so we don't really have to worry about the screen reader experience more which makes sense if you look at it from that point of view but if you look at it from a different angle to go how can we serve everyone best then actually you know what writing better html which is better for screen readers actually makes the site faster how about that which makes it better for everybody else and so i think those are the kinds of things that you know designers are just not educated enough in you know so there's an education problem there and then also designers you know they're not taught that however they learn whether they they are brought up on their own or you know self-taught or learned in school or went to design school i think it it takes people to go well let's stop for a minute and let's just take 30 minutes you know maybe maybe to think about how this might work and see if there are better solutions for everyone and i think you know more often than not just taking that time to do it yields some really good solutions i love that i'm smiling because they're such a parallel to um you know people who study organizations know very well that so often you know problems show up in um how they're affecting people who are in the minority right but so often you know making things better for people who are in the minority typically in an organization by their race and or gender makes things better for the majority like it's you know i think it's the exact same thing and getting away from the zero sum mindset allows you to you know to identify those things that actually are going to improve everyone's experience improve you know whatever the goal is um and i yeah i think that's a really powerful uh insight can we can we talk a little bit about um sort of the diversity of audience you know you mentioned making things better for some groups will sort of make it better for all what are the challenges of sort of designing for all today technology reaches so many people in so many different areas just millions and millions of people in some cases you know how does a designer think about that where do you focus do you focus like you've suggested sometimes you narrow in on like well who's the biggest part of our audience or do you actually step back and think well how do we make this work for everyone when certainly not everyone has the same experiences with technology yeah i'm glad you brought that up because one of the things that i see in training designers and as a designer myself is the hardest part is not you know making the shapes you know or getting in photoshop or illustrator or whatever you use you know and and it's not the craft part the hardest part is decision making you know and prioritization and again a colleen as you were saying organizationally that's a hard thing to do and leadership that's a hard thing to do is to say we're going to focus on this because by virtue of saying that you're also saying we're not going to focus on this other thing either temporarily or ever so that's a really hard thing to do and so how do you balance that with designing for all you know one of the things that i try to to tell a lot of the designers that i work with is in most cases they are not designing for all so there is a point of focus and i kind of i'm come from the school of thought that focusing and specialization and niche is important and is useful and is helpful and so and i also think that there is some kind of exclusivity that is advantageous at points so an example is you know a jewish dating site you know that's not a site that's for everyone you know nor should it be so i think there are spaces that are designed for particular people to be able to flourish and i think that you know for better or worse i think that that's part of our society right now um and so i think that being able to design for that is important where it gets really tricky is you know designers who come out of design school all of a sudden sometimes they go work at facebook and now all of a sudden you're designing all for a 2 billion person audience right out of school or even if you had 10 years of experience or 15 years out of experience that is an unprecedented design problem you know design challenges now you're designing global a platform globally that takes into account governments and race and all these factors at scale who has the training for that so i think that that is a you know i think that there are there are generalities to kind of fall back on one is you know the idea of universal design so you know universal design is creating principles and having a set of principles that can apply to everyone you know and a lot of that comes down to not skill and craft but belief i think that's what's really tough about that is what do you believe about what people have access to what do you believe about their rights what do you believe about who should be able to do what and who should not be able to do what those are hard design problems it's the same skill that you would take you know drawing an interface for people to to you know submit a form it's just scaled differently and so it's a really tough problem to go how do you design for all i don't think that a lot of designers have experience doing that and how could they you know like only now in the last whatever few decades have designers had the opportunity to deploy something to two billion people across the globe and see how they work with it that's a that's a new phenomenon for us and so we're screwing it up you know and hopefully it'll get better but i think we need to be conscious about it and intentional about again back to design the rendering of intent what is the intent of this you know what is the intent of what we're actually making and how does that go how does that not get manipulated you know and i think that's the other part of that that's the flip side that dave you're talking about which is i think we have to now take into account where does this go wrong where does this fail where does this get get screwed up what are the things that we don't anticipate and i think those are the really right places to include other people to go you know what as a as a cisgender male there are things that i don't know about how other people who are not in that demographic are going to use this i need to get their their perspectives this is very important otherwise my work is going to be incomplete because there's a whole side of this that i'm not considering dan we've talked about sort of you know designing for whom right you've talked about you know how important it is to include you know the range of people who might use a certain kind of product or service or whatever and how you know often that doesn't happen how important that is and i guess i want to sort of flip that on its head a little bit and think about who's doing the designing right so just like many many other industries um you know it's it's not as diverse as the population right just you know to put it very simply so i wonder if you can kind of tackle it from that angle of the what what happens um when the people doing the designing sort of have some limitations which you've already talked about a bit um in accordance with their particular identity and and their place in the world yeah that's a wow what a deep topic that is um i think that a lot of it is thinking about like how did tech start you know in the tech world that we have right now who gets to design and why do they get to design and other people don't get to design um i like the school of thought that everyone is a designer everything everyone can be a designer so i i try to take a more broad world view and part of that is because that's what i want you know so it's certainly biased in terms of that um but right now you know at least when it started tech was expensive and tech is still expensive to get into you know for a designer if you think about just the equipment a designer has to have you know you got to have a macbook probably because that's what the tech world uses and that's a couple thousand dollar machine you know and then you have to have software that cost hundreds of dollars and sometimes thousands of dollars then you have education that cost thousands of dollars sometimes or if you're self-taught you have to you know put in the work and the rigor of finding the things that are applicable to you like so there's a lot of barriers to folks that have lower income to just getting into tech and that that in itself means that there's a particular type of demographic that we see designing the things that the tech products that we use and those are 30 to 40 year old white men um and so because of that myopia because of that you know it is a specific demographic that's doing the designing it stands to reason that that it's only going to serve one population and so i think a lot of the things that we're seeing as a society is as more or different parts of our populated population are represented in the designing not just the not just consuming what is designed we're seeing a lot more creativity and a lot more more solutions to different kinds of problems and so i think that's why it's important to have a lot more representation in our industry about how do we get more women how do we get more people of color how do we get more underrepresented groups in tech to help create more solutions around this i think tech is is pervasive now we all have super computers in our pockets now and so what can what could we do with that if you give it to the right people and so right now the right people don't have it you know some of the right people have it but not enough of them do and i think that more access to tools and technologies and um and for people who are at groups who are underrepresented i think we're going to see wonders from that i hope that that becomes a thing i hope that becomes a thing that that more people have access to because i think that's going to be important for the world and if they if we don't i think that's going to be very impactful for the world in a in a very negative sense i want to say that's actually a fantastic perspective on where technology can take us and i think that that's really important to imagine not only where are we making mistakes where are we doing things wrong but you know what are the opportunities and it makes me think i know this is going to be a question beyond um what we would typically ask someone like yourself who's so experienced in design but as a citizen where do you think that impetus comes from where would you hope that it comes from does it come from government does it come from designers does it come from businesses does it come from activism where do you think we get the drive to make the change i think the drive to make change sometimes comes from pain and i think that that is unfortunate but i think that that's motivating too so i'm not sure if that's a thing that we should eliminate but i think you know there is thing to you know missing paying your credit card bill because the interface wouldn't load you know because i you know and and that's like that's a first world problem it's if there's even more of a stink not paying electrical because the interface wouldn't load you know and so there are these these systemic barriers to you know to to being able to do the things that are your rights and then there are barriers you know to doing things that you just want to do and i think that there are there's room for all of that stuff and so i think the impetus comes from i experience pain and i no longer want to i think that's where a lot of products get designed from i need a better note-taking app because taking notes sucked in that class okay so you build a note-taking app and i think that that a lot of people's lived experience informs what they want solutions to you know i can't find a parking spot i need a parking app right and so i think that what we're seeing is the people who have a lot of means that are in tech are designing problems for people with a lot of means you know maybe not in tech which makes a lot of sense and so how do we democratize that a little bit more how do we say well what about people that have are having different problems how do they get to voice their concerns and i think a lot of that comes from as designers as people with means as people with privilege we have to do a better job of listening because otherwise there's no there's no forum for it you know there's no there's no ability to to say you know someone else is having a problem that i don't experience and yet i have the skills to be able to solve that but i'm not going to because i just don't know about it i mean that's immature you know at that point that's like that's you know that's almost abdicating you know i would put that as a responsibility nowadays that we have to do those things you know otherwise our world is not going to get better so how do we as designers do a better job of listening to communities that we're not typically part of and including people from communities that we're not typically part of i think that's an important and important uh pathway for this field to be able to thrive if we really are going to have the impact on the world that i think design can have we have to be able to listen to more folks than we're than we're used to listening to and that really that really goes right back um to what you said before about getting the direct tools and empowering the people who know what their problems are and making sure that those people are fed into this system of designing and creating technology and i think there's some systemic issues there about like you say about privilege about access about resources etc and i think there's a lot of work certainly we hope that educational institutions can help with in that space but certainly other other opportunities and i know that um i know that you and uh your work at super friendly um you've worked to bring other people in to the design space that haven't uh necessarily had access can you just say a little bit about some of the things you've done yeah sure i mean a lot of this comes from my experience too i have brown skin my parents are immigrants um you know i'm a first generation in this country and i watched them work really hard we grew up in north philly uh and i wasn't poor and i wasn't rich you know we were like we were uh upper lower class you know and then lower middle class you know growing up and i watched my parents work really hard and um i wouldn't be able to be in tech had it not been for partially their hard work and their and their work ethic and then honestly just people giving me a chance and lending their privilege to me so like you know one of my cousins who worked in it dropped off a a totally legal copy of photoshop when i was you know 13 or 14 and i just tinkered around with it and i was lucky to have a computer you know my dad had brought an old computer home from work when i was eight and so having a computer is a form of privilege for me that allowed me to get into tech and when i talk to a lot of folks now they're like oh i didn't have a computer growing up until i was you know 16. you know and that's you know you miss the formative years of being able to have that be affluent technology and so um and so one of the things that we had we had at super friendly for a little while was was an apprenticeship uh and so our model is that we don't hire anyone full-time we we're a model of freelancers that are collected for every project and every account that we work on is a team of specialists that are that are combined just for that work um and so we don't hire anyone full-time but but we also the kind of the exception to that was we had an apprenticeship where we would work with folks that just wanted to get into tech so they had no tech skills already they but they had maybe an appreciation for design or appreciation for development or engineering that would it would be able to like get an entry-level job so we would train them for nine months and then help and then put them on some projects that we work on so client projects paying projects and then help them get a job elsewhere whether that's a product company or an in-house studio or an agency or freelancing on their own you know we help them with resume prep we'd help them with getting portfolios together um because how else are people gonna do that you know like and it's not a replacement for a four-year education at a design school it's not a replacement for you know for anything else but it's a way to get an entry-level job um and so you know we had a lot of of career switchers we had a lot of people who were you know substitute teachers that instead said like i want to make a a career out of something else we had some people that were kind of like working odd jobs every year you know that wanted a career you know wanted some stability that being a designer or being an engineer or a developer could give them and so that's important to us because again that's the same thing where you know had i not had somebody give me something when i was younger i wouldn't have been in this field and that has been really transformative for me and for my family and so why not give that access to someone else i'm wondering if they're um if there's as a designer do you feel like there's limitations to current technologies like are there things you wish technology would do and again this may be limitations of who's actually building the technologies that you build with but are there things you wish it did that would let you allow your designs to reach more people or adapt to more people yeah i think design is expensive and i think it's slow um and so um in design there is a at least now in in digital design there are a lot of different movements happening there's a movement called the no code movement which is the idea that you can just draw something and then it can work um and so lots of tools emerging kind of in that space right now which is great because i think um whether or not that is the particular movement that we'll catch on you know and people will kind of hop on that i think the idea of it is sound which is we need to make access faster um because you know if i have an idea for something well i have to design it then i have to code it and then i have to deploy it and then i have to manage it and like all of that stuff takes a long time you know and if you're an organization of any particular size that is hiring a company or a freelancer or somebody to make them something digital you know you're talking six months sometimes from idea to fruition that cycle is too long right so if we're going to try to make change in a system you know maybe fortunately a lot of our systems are slow so they can afford to have slow solutions uh applied to them but there are other things that need to happen faster and so that's one of the things that i see like how can we get from idea to to launch in a much faster way um does that mean we need to pare down our idea you know does that mean we need to try things more do we need does that mean we need to try more things and so a lot of our work tends to focus on you know this idea that is particularly popular in tech which is the idea of an mvp a minimum viable product um we try to focus a lot of our work on that rather than spending six months to do a thing is there a way that we could spend six weeks to do a thing because maybe it'll be cheaper that way maybe it'll be faster maybe we'll learn things more that way and so that that probably is one of my biggest frustrations in tech and in design is that the speed of which we can have impact is too slow right now and i think that's gotten faster over time i would like it to go even faster and i know that that will you know with great power comes great responsibility i know that will be a um wielded in the wrong hands that will be just as bad as it can be good but i like to i hope to look at the glass half full version of that to go maybe we can deploy systems and solutions that help people faster than it you know then then we're doing right now you know what would you advise people like me who see how important this is but we're not you know we're not doing this kind of work what's the right way for us to participate in this help make sure that the right communities are heard you know to as just as citizens right to kind of move the needle on this um even further i don't know if i have answers to that but i have some thoughts and i have some opinions about it so nothing that i've seen as definitive at least and these are you know these are newer thoughts for me so they're still kind of developing one of the things that i'm learning especially lately especially in the last year or two is how important amplification is and i think that people in power are often expected to have the answer and then when they don't have an answer they just stay silent um because they don't know what else to do and one of the things that i've been trying to practice a lot more is well it seems like other people have the answer especially sometimes people who are not in power people do who do not have power and so can we just point to them you know could we just say like well what about that what about what they're saying because so far what we haven't been doing or what we have been doing hasn't been working so can we start listening to the people who we haven't been listening to because what we're doing who we have been listening to now hasn't been working so we have to change something we have to change some of the variables in order to get a different result otherwise it is just insanity to just continue to do what we're doing and so for people who are designers who are not designers i think you know keep an eye out and keep an ear out for people who just have not been listened to historically systemically you know traditionally and let's start pointing at those things let's start considering those things especially if they're outside of our perspective and worldview in order to stretch us and in order to go all right well we need to include more people in this we need to include more thoughts more ideas because what we've been doing has not been working and so let's be more humble let's be more all right well let's try that thing because because maybe that'll work um let's listen to that let's try that perspective and so i think that's the thing that i would say to non-designers is you know you you you have the ability to amplify too you don't have to be able to render the rendering part is not the is not the important part it's the intent part and so how can you broadcast that a little bit more so before we end and just curious you know is there anything that you'd like to share in terms of resources or things for people to be thinking about who kind of want to dig deeper into these topics yeah great um i actually have this book that i'm reading i started reading it last week um and so a lot of this is top of mind for me uh the book i have it here is called mismatch it's by kat holmes who was the i believe she was a former director of inclusive design at microsoft and i think she's at salesforce now um and i've been learning a lot from that book one of the things that they kind of jumped out of me is is what she talks about inclusive design and how she talks about that and she says like it's anyone who recognizes an inclusive designer is anyone who recognizes and remedies mismatch interactions between people and their world and i think that's given me a new lens to think about how i how i can be as a designer and what my role is as a designer so it's a short book it's a quick read but it is very very impactful i would highly recommend anyone that is thinking about either either they are a designer or thinking about being a designer it's a really great framing on the role that design plays in our world to create better interactions between people and the abilities that they have and don't have so i'm learning a lot of things i've been a designer for a long time and this is really shifting my my world view about it too so very impactful book really a really great one i would recommend that's great thank you as an academic institution we do like to encourage people to read so that seems that seems a very appropriate note to end on that's really great and and thanks for your perspective on that thank you this has been really fabulous that's all we have for today but the conversation continues and we want to hear from everyone out there in our community who's listening um to this interview so please send your questions comments ideas reactions etc to justdigital.hbs.edu you've been watching pathways to a just digital future an investigative project that aims to better understand and address inequality in tech this program was produced by the harvard business school digital and gender initiatives our team includes ethiopia almighty and my cat tonya flint one more time liz sarley thomas and i'm colleen ammerman thanks for hanging out with us keep exploring at justdigital.hbs.edu

2021-03-02 09:39

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