The need for reflexivity in design: a critical review of Tom Greever’s “Articulating Design Decisions”
Over the past year, I read 41 books on design. Of all of the books recommended to me by mentors and peers, Greever’s “Articulating Design Decisions” was the most baffling in terms of credibility.
Although the book is generally well praised in the community, I want to highlight Greever’s failure to be reflexive along with the consequences his book may create for the design community at large.
Greever argues that being articulate leads to success in design. Although Greever has useful points throughout the book, he goes a step too far on a section specifically about mastering charm and confidence by projecting his own biases as a white male designer on his readers.
The most useful tool you have in being charming is confidence. If you have confidence in yourself and your designs, people will trust you and give you the freedom to decide. When you lack confidence, you convey uncertainty, which leads stakeholders to question your solution.
— Greever, 112
…Not just confidence and charm, but overconfidence too…
No only can overconfidence make you successful even when you know you’re bluffing, it might eventually become just regular old confidence
— Greever, 113
…All while having a good time…
By focusing on having a good time yourself, you’ll generate a fun, positive attitude that will infect those around you more charming.
— Greever, 115
…With only the most trustworthy of citations.
11 M., Brian. “How to Be Charming to Women.” http://bit.ly/IJfCLWT
As I mentioned earlier, these are all probably useful tips for white men in the design community. The real problem lies in who his audience is. Although white male designers may be able to find success in articulating design decisions through confidence and charm, it is not the same playing field for women and minorities.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic articulates this point in his book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders:
We are, it seems, less likely to tolerate high confidence in women than we are in men. This bias creates a lose-lose situation for women. Since women are seen as less confident than men and since we see confidence as pivotal to leadership, we demand extra displays of confidence in women to consider them worthy of leadership positions. However, when a woman does seem as confident as, or more confident than, men, we are put off by her because high confidence does not fit our gender stereotypes.
There are more barriers to speaking up and being articulate for more than half the population. For example, men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men. Caroline Criado Perez points this out countless times in her book Invisible Women:
Telling women to behave more like men — as if male behaviour is a gender-neutral default — is unhelpful, and in fact potentially damaging.
Greever’s identity as a white male designer empowers him to be able to rely on tools such as ‘charm’ more effectively than others. It is disappointing then to note that Greever never addresses the benefits and privilege of his status. Even worse, he uses his lived experiences as a catch-all by citing a tacky website tailored to white men who struggle to find the spotlight at social events.
With further thought, I found Greever’s book to be an ironic representation of the broader UX community. Despite encouraging and praising empathy (see page 40), Greever failed to put it in practice. He failed to thoroughly check his own perspective. More than ever, we as designers need to practice reflexivity to counter naive realism.
Michael Patton, author of Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods, is a strong believer in reflexivity and defines it as:
The practice of deep introspection, political consciousness, cultural awareness, and ownership of one’s perspective.
He argues that we should be inspired by classic feminist theory to acknowledge our biases and limitations and to honor that multiple perspectives exist. This goes hand-in-hand with a core tenet of inclusive design: recognize exclusion. As designers, we are responsible to acknowledge who will be excluded from using what we build- or, in this instance, teach.
More practically in the design world, reflexivity calls on us to employ practitioner triangulation, heterogeneous teams, and an ever-active acknowledgement that we are not our end user.
You might be wondering: well, what next? What can we do as designers to articulate our design decisions if we can’t rely on our charm or confidence in meetings or recognize our own biases?
Well, Tom actually nails it on the head later on in his book. It’s called research. *gasp*
Let your users do the talking for you. We are storytellers, not autobiographers. Instead of using our charm or lived experiences to carry us through meetings, we should rely on anecdotes from the field, usability tests, and data validation. Design decisions should not be justified after-the-fact. They should be crafted through cognitive empathy (the active listening kind) to reveal unknown biases and eliminate arbitrary choices.
If you are relying on subjective gut-feelings or referencing personal lived experiences to get through a meeting, you are probably not equipped to succeed by your leadership or your project timeline. If you do have leadership support and a flexible timeline, but defer to blind confidence instead, you run the risk of ethically compromising your work.
Beyond user research, it is almost imperative that we as designers continually self-evaluate the limitations of our own perspectives by actively listening to the lived experiences of others in our day-to-day lives.
I am truthfully embarrassed to say that I would have never written this article had I not been recommended to read “The Moment of Lift” by one of my close mentors Z. Thanks to Z and other incredible women leaders at Deloitte Digital, I took on a summer of feminist reading that tore down illusions I was not even aware of due to naive realism and projection bias.
That being said, here are some books that significantly helped me reshape my design career and perspective. I am confident others reading this article can benefit from the knowledge these incredible authors have to share.
- Invisible Women
- The Moment of Lift
- The Politics of Design
- Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders
- Mismatch
If anyone has additional recommended books or resources others (including Tom Greever) can benefit from, please note them out in the comments.
I want to thank Maddie Devine, Sharon Messina, and Rica Rosario for supporting me with this article.
A note from Maddie, who is a fantastic inclusive designer at Deloitte Digital, and the best desk partner in the world:
I challenge you to read some articles such as the Harvard Business Review’s “Is the Confidence Gap Between Men and Women a Myth?” just to gather a mix of perspectives and research findings.
A note on the author (me) to give more context for this article and to self-identify biases.
My name is Joshua Kim. I am a Korean-American UX Designer working at Deloitte Digital. I was educated with a business degree (information technology) along with a minor in computer science at Virginia Tech. I was introduced to UX by Kim Gausepohl Ph.d at an internship at VT NI&S, but am mostly self-taught. Much of my knowledge is rooted in 63 books/textbooks on design I have read over the past three years with guidance from my mentor Brendan Strahm who is a UX lead at Deloitte Digital.
Politically I grew up traditionally conservative in a Christian, military family. My political beliefs shifted left during my work at Deloitte Digital. I began to identify as a feminist in the summer of 2019 after a series of books and conversations with close (and inspiring) female mentors/friends.
My job experience in a consultancy made Greever’s book repetitive and unhelpful to my personal growth. I am well aware that this is a lived experience unique to myself, and that there are many other chapters in Greever’s book that may be relevant and useful to others in the design community. That being said, I am still willing to debate that there are many other resources that are better grounded to learn from.
