Project 2: Blog Post Reflection
Diversity Within A Team of Designers
By Shruti Prasanth and Carolyn Youstra
Throughout How People Work, we have focused on understanding the diversity of users; through worldview, emotion and cognition, levels of privilege, and accessibility. Because all people and mental frameworks all differ, we acknowledge that design empathy can never be all-inclusive. A core factor that is often overlooked, is how the team of designers themselves need to be diverse, in order for their work to appeal to a greater range of people. Through reflecting on class discussions and lectures, we chose to focus in particular how the formation of a team affects the design process, not just on how users are impacted.
To start, we were introduced to the concept of worldviews, and the idea that people have conceptions of what they experience. From the Alterity and Inclusivity lecture, we considered how diversity in design is only possible if the team of designers themselves are as diverse as possible. One core idea is the matrix of domination, or how there are levels of privilege and prejudice. There are interlocking systems at different scales, starting from the individual person, within the community, then within the society. It is important to consider that when formulating a team, not everyone should be the same race, ethnicity, gender, or have similar experiences. For example, if everyone grew up in wealthy upper class families, their knowledge of interacting with certain systems, might be greater, because they’ve had more exposure and opportunity to handle more expensive, modern, products or services. For the commonality of people, designers need to have the mindset to think from the perspective of the basic person, who may or may not have such privileges or experiences.
Additionally, the Design and Emotion guest lecture delivered by Jonathan Chapman helped provide insight into how all design is emotional, and how humans are social creatures biologically built to interact. We interpret each other’s body language, expressions, and behaviors, to make sense of other people. Interpreting our experiences into human terms, which could be our motivations, beliefs, or feelings, is a term called anthropomorphism. It is therefore important that with a diverse team, comes the diversity of personalities and characters. If people are all introverts or extroverts for example, or have similar ways of responding to situations and stimuli, their thought processes will be influenced by how they naturally think, feel, and react, rather than factoring how a wide range of people may make sense of a design. Music may have a positive connotation for some people, and negative for others, and color palettes may evoke certain feelings in some people, and different ones for others. The more one gets used to how various types of people express themselves within their team, the more they can understand many people’s behaviors, and design for a wide range of human emotions.
Design empathy is a skill that requires frequent practice, takes a diverse team to step out of biases to design for other human beings unlike themselves, and is not something that can be acquired by human-centered research alone. It must be developed through interaction with people who have new voices, perspectives, and leadership. We must show we are inclusive ourselves in how we promote suppressed voices in the field of design, and represent the diversity a team hopes to realize.
