Why It Matters Who Designs

10.3. Why It Matters Who Designs#

10.3.1. Who gets designed for#

When designers and programmers don’t think to take into account different groups of people, then they might make designs that don’t work for everyone. This problem often shows up in how designs do or do not work for people with disabilities. But it also shows up in other areas as well.

The following tweet has a video of a soap dispenser that apparently was only designed to work for people with light-colored skin.[1]


Similarly, Twitter looked into bias in how their automatic image cropping algorithm worked [j20].

10.3.2. Who gets to be designers#

In how we’ve been talking about accessible design, the way we’ve been phrasing things has implied a separation between designers who make things, and the disabled people who things are made for. And unfortunately, as researcher Dr. Cynthia Bennett [j21] points out, disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves, or even when they do participate in the design, they aren’t considered to be the “real designers.” You can see Dr. Bennet’s research talk on this in the following Youtube Video:

10.3.3. Design Justice#

We mentioned Design Justice [j22] earlier, but it is worth reiterating again here that design justice includes considering which groups get to be part of the design process itself.

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