Designing across margins
About Privilege in Tech and talking about Inclusivity in Asia’s Technology Industry.
The topic around Diversity, Inclusion and Ethics has become commonplace in the world of technology and design industry over the past couple of years. Though they may be popular talking points, the issue has rarely left western shores. Considering how important and close to home these topics are to us, it is rarely talked about in majority of formerly colonised Asia.
Before I start, I will preface that nothing I’m about to say is new especially if you follow design twitter. What surprises me is how there are very few voices from Southeast Asia speaking about these problems. Considering the history of colonialism in this region of the world (especially in the Philippines), most issues around #decolonizingdesign have mostly been from the west. What I’m about to share are general excerpts from my talk from this year’s UXPH2019 interspersed with thoughts that I was not able to mention during my presentation.
Let’s talk about Privilege
Any conversation about inclusion and diversity needs to start and be rooted in a grounded conversation around Privilege. When we talk about discrimination in our communities it’s easy to disregard people’s experience citing things like “we don’t care about your sexual orientation” or “we only care about your skills, not your diploma”. We tend to overlook other forms of discrimination and oppression in Asia because the first thing we usually think about is race or colour. It’s often hard to make people in conferences relate to as well because of the false sense that most Asian countries our homogenous. Privilege cuts across these politics and identities and is a concept that makes us look at the inequalities we see around us beyond race, colour, gender.
What is privilege?
By definition, privilege is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. The keyword here to focus on is advantage. Admitting your privilege does not invalidate your efforts to get where you are, but it’s about understanding how society tips the scales in your favour for just being born the way you are.
A good way to demonstrate this is to compare my experiences with that of a good illustrator/designer friend of mine Gab Madrid.
Gab and I went to a private catholic male-exclusive highschool. This in itself shows a certain level of privilege shared between the two of us. We’re both currently working as designers in tech companies and have worked hard to get where we are in our careers. In fact, I’d like to say we’ve made pretty great careers out of our mutual love of creativity but this doesn’t mean our struggles we’re the same. Gab, together with his sister, was mostly raised by a single parent. While they we’re able to afford the tuition for private school, there was not much for anything else that the pressures of private school education forces you to have. They could not afford a personal computer or internet access at home growing up. In contrast, I was gifted with a PC which I shared with my sister throughout my education. This simple fact meant that while I had the luxury of being able to practice graphic design as a hobby all throughout my high school life, Gab had to save his own pocket money, go to an internet cafe and pay for the use of a computer with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator by the hour. Our efforts to get the same skillset is vastly different and incomparable.
Where there is privilege there is Marginalization. Marginalization is when people are treated as insignificant or peripheral. It’s important to understand that privilege and marginalization are not mutually exclusive. You can be both privileged in one aspect and marginalized in another. Understanding how these multiple concepts exist in your life at the same time is a core idea of intersectionality.
Another thing to understand about this concept is that not all types of privilege are made equal. Certain privileges can make it easier for you to live through marginalization.
I may be:
- Southeast Asian
- born in the global south in the post-colonial Philippines
- living with a chronic illness or disability
- an Atheist in a majority Catholic country
- homosexual with certain gender non-conforming expressions interests like my love for make-up
However:
- I also have a college degree which makes it easier to find a job in a competitive developing market
- I am a cisgender male, I don’t necessarily fear going out alone at night nor am I questioned for what I wear
- I was born and currently live in what is called “imperial manila”, an urban city which makes most things accessible to me and opens up opportunities that most LGBTQ people in rural Philippines find hard to get.
- My college degree comes from a top private university which puts me at an advantage in the job market
- My family had money growing up, which gives me some level of safety net.
What does this have to do with UX or Design?
You might be wondering how a lot of these left-leaning, socialist concepts connect to design. Well, it’s actually a lot more connected than you think because Privilege impacts Empathy.
Privilege often creates a security blanket, it puts us in a comfortable place and leaves us undisturbed. It often creates a narrative that what what we see and what we feel is the entirety of a situation because of the safety nets we have.
There have been numerous studies and that shows how privilege blinds us from recognizing peoples emotion. In one particular study, people of a lower economic background were able to recognise the emotions of the other person in the room more accurately than their more privileged counterparts.
Privilege also comes with a certain level of power. This reflects when we do our user research and we approach our user groups with set assumptions and expectations. Our interviews and analyses are laced with the biases that we forget to ask “what do I have that makes this easy for me but excruciating for others”.
This is a very important thing to recognize because empathy is such an important part of our craft. If there’s anything I’ve taken away after years of working as a designer is that as designers, we are in the business of empathy. We’ve heard this word over and over throughout our careers — it’s become our rallying cry and the first thing we say whenever we run into a design problem. As we continue to talk about empathy and create keynote after keynote, selling conference after conference we’ve also oversimplified empathy to just “talking to our users”. As Vivienne Castillo put it, most of our talk on empathy is bullshit.
We’ve gotten so good at simplifying this concept that we not only simplify the idea of empathy but have gained the habit of simplifying our users as just numbers based on characteristics of what we see as similar. We’ve focused so much on what makes people the same that we’ve neglected to look at the pain, emotion or intricacies that make each person unique, individual, and different.
True empathy is not just a skill but a challenge to look beyond what makes us comfortable. It includes being able to step into another person’s shoes, feeling what they feel, caring about what they care about, needing what they need. As the study above mentioned it’s recognizing the emotion in someone else so you can act on it. Here’s the thing, you can’t recognize what you don’t know. If you don’t know how it feels to be afraid of being sexually assaulted at night then how can you actually recognize that fear? If you don’t know how it feels to be afraid to hold hands with your love one then how can you say you actually understand how that feels. The reality is, you don’t. We can get close to how it feels but the more privileged you are the more likely it is that these realities are very distant to you to understand.
Designing for the Marginalized
You may be asking “if we can’t really empathize with the marginalized, how can we design for these marginalized communities?”. The reality is YOU can’t but that doesn’t mean WE can’t create a design solution at all.
Privilege creates blindsides that we cannot necessarily see ourselves, but if we ask other people who can see where we can’t and cover our blindsides to help us design we probably could. To design inclusive solutions, especially for marginalized, post-colonial Southeast Asia, we need to create design teams and communities that are inclusive of these marginalized groups..
Inclusivity vs Diversity
Note I say inclusivity and not diversity. As Amelie Lamont explains in her talk, it’s easy to say you’re diverse. You can hire one gay guy, a person with a disability and a transwoman and say you’re diverse but are they included in your decisions? Most companies will say “we don’t care if your LGBTQ” or “we don’t care about your degree or what school you come from” however how many of these companies actually give equity to minorities to succeed and be part of decisions when it comes to the products they create? How many companies actually have women, queer people, indigenous identities or people with disabilities in leadership positions and have seats at the table?
The idea of diversity without inclusion can have devastating effects on products, services and even conferences for minorities. A quick enumeration:
- When the Apple Watch was first released, one of it’s most promising features was the heart monitor, unfortunately, this had problems when it was used by people with darker skin.
- When Google first released the algorithm for google photos that automatically tagged people, animals and places it actually tagged black people as gorillas.
- When facebook originally released it’s Facebook groups it came with a caveat around privacy settings that actually out-ed multiple LGBTQI people to their families.
The ethical responsibility and consequences of the digital products we’ve created are big and heavy. These consequences are multiplied ten-fold for communities who have constantly lived in the margins — people who have been left out in our world that’s mostly been designed by and only for the western, white, heteronormative male.
The answer to this is is probably to get more people from these communities into design but that’s easier said than done. An excuse that’s often given is that for some of these communities (Southeast Asian, LGBTQI, Women or PWD) there is just simply not enough of them entering the industry. I personally find this not true. For Southeast Asians (a huge chunk still live in the shadow of its western colonial past) in particular there are UX conferences in Bangkok, Jakarta, Malaysia, Manila and Singapore that teach and educate UX for years yet still our panels mostly include white cis-het speakers. How can we talk about designing in Asia and improving the calibre of Asian designers when even our panels barely include a single Asian from the region? Before we put the blame on a marginalized community about why they’re marginalized in a certain space or industry, we need to first ask if we are being inclusive to these marginalized communities. Are we actually offering not just equality but equity for them to compete for side by side with a powerful majority.
The messiah complex
This is not meant as indictment or to spread hatred of the west but as a call to understand who we’re leaving behind as we continue to design solutions to improve the state of humanity. More than just a call to #decolonizedesign it’s a call for designers to look and recognize an idea that cuts across race, origin, economic status, sex, sexual preference, identity or nationality. It’s a call to realize that we aren’t necessarily better than the people we design for. It’s a call to stare the ego we’ve created around design as prideful and messianic. If anything the biggest problem the blindness that privilege creates it’s the messiah complex that designers are the only ones who can solve design problems.
We should always be aware of how privilege colours what we define as “better” or “an improvement”. Who are we to say that our solutions are better for people who live lives vastly different from our own? We must always be wary about what a misguided messiah complex creates — after all the last time people felt messianic about indigenous people, let’s just say it wasn’t that great.
Having empathy is very different from having sympathy. The underprivileged do not need our sympathy, they need true empathy. We can’t keep holding on to our $1000 laptops, complaining about not being able to get an uber or grab and spending thousands on conferences that continue to just create bigger gaps between us and the people we’re designing for.
We have to stop automatically thinking that we know what’s best for the people we design for. We need to stop designing FOR people and start designing WITH people. If you are a western expat coming into Southeast Asia, ask yourself how you can bring local people into the work you do. If you’re a straight man or woman in leadership, ask yourself how you can encourage more queer people to work with you and create solutions that include their environments. If you are an abled designer, ask what can you do to make sure that people with disabilities actually have a voice and are not left out in the decisions you create.
Unless…the only users you recognize as people are people who are like you.
Credit where credit is due, if you wish to learn more about Designing inclusively:
- An overdue conversation: The UX Research Industry’s Achilles Heel by Vivienne Castillo
- Why most conversations in Tech About Diversity Are Bullshit by Vivienne Castillo
- The P Word by Vivienne Castillo
- Diversity vs Inclusion by Amelie Lamont
