Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm a user experience designer, a fairly trendy new field in this day and age. And my job, I primarily work with digital products, so mostly websites and apps. And I do my best to make them as accessible and usable and hopefully even ethical as possible. And as someone who works primarily in the world of the digital, I'm always really interested by the precedence set by designers and design movements of the past. In particular, Charles and Ray Eames, respectively an architect and artist who became product designers who are responsible for some of the most innovative and iconic furniture of the 20th century and were known for using materials like plywood in exciting and innovative ways to create deeply functional and humanist while still beautiful accessible technologies. And one of the things that I find particularly inspiring about their work is this fundamental design philosophy that permeates through their products, and that's this idea of the relationship between the designer and the user as a sort of guest host relationship. In fact, Charles Eames would go into this in more detail to quote, for him, the designer or the architect or whoever it was making this product, their role was that akin to a good and thoughtful host, all of whose energy goes into predicting and anticipating the needs of their user. And so as we look at the technologies and the products that we use every day that we have become so dependent on, it's often actually quite shameful to see how often that guest host, or indeed the host guest relationship, actually breaks down. I mean, just think about how your favorite mapping tool insists that the best way to get to your friend's house in November at 9 p.m. is under the bridge of a poorly lit canal, like, oh, I'm not so sure about this. Or think about how difficult it is to let your favorite social media platform know that you face harassment and abuse from racists and misogynists online. Every day we are faced by examples of the way that our services do not live up to this guest host relationship, and I think it's paramount for us who are designers of these systems to ask why. After all, design has evolved. We don't, or at least we're not meant to design for the quasi-platonic ideal. Phrases like inclusive design, participatory design, community-led design, these are all phrases and methodologies that we constantly refer to within our everyday design speak. And yet, as someone who's quite interested in critical theory, I often wonder if part of the problem is that the way we use these actually quite radical methodologies still ends up centering the designer at the heart of the product. And so we end up in a situation where even when using inclusive design frameworks, in a sense the designer is still at the center of it all, only in this case they deign so graciously to allow the user some input at some point in the design journey. I often think this is also exemplified in our incredibly simplistic ways of describing empathy. Now, empathy is very popular now, you know, you hear all designers talk about it, we're meant to design with empathy, we're meant to empathetically design. And yet what I find interesting is when we talk about what this means, we often use incredibly simplistic metaphors, such as put yourself in the other person's shoes, often forgetting that the shoes of the other are not, in fact, on the same plane. And this is an insight that sociologists and historians and critical theorists alike have consistently and repeatedly remind us of. And yet as designers we so often forget, in some ways empathy is not some universal transcendent, but a substance that has its own flow, and that flow goes according to the different gradients of relative social privilege. In fact, if we go backwards a bit and really think about this metaphor of the guest and host, we kind of realize how absurd these quite simplistic notions of designing with empathy are. After all, as a guest, say my best friend Sonia was coming over for dinner, I wouldn't think, okay, broccoli, green beans, let me empathize, put myself in her position, no, I would have taken the time to have found out and directly engaged with her to understand what her preference in green, vitamin D-rich vegetables were. As such, to speak of empathy without understanding the effort involved to overcome the impedance provided by relative social privilege is in a way a nonsense. To quote Harim Manan, empathy that is still built in social privilege, that does not force us to go beyond our comfort zone to fully engage with the user can often be an impediment. Justin Moore, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, often talks about the need to redesign the designer, and he talks about this in two main contexts. One, for us to seriously question and ask ourselves about who gets to become designers, why it is that the pipeline is so non-diverse in spite of the fact that often these designers are meant to be designing for diverse, if not fully global, populations. Part of his question about how we redesign the designer also asks about how exactly are we educating and teaching designers to enable them to holistically consider the needs of their users? I think there's a third aspect of this as well which ties into that, not only for those of us who are serious about inclusive design, might we also start thinking about the way we can actually distribute design knowledge amongst the very communities we work with, but it also makes us question the depth of our own practices, how we are fully engaging and including the user as we design systems which will impact their everyday life. And so if empathy is not enough, then what is needed is a deliberate, consistent and embedded engagement with our users, with the other. Now, someone might ask, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. One does not want to appear tokenistic, and at this point, I urge everyone to almost take a step back and really look at this sodden little isle of ours that breaks up the Atlantic Ocean so helpfully and to really consider the social inequalities and paradigms that we exist in. We exist in a country where the black prison population is seven times greater per population, and this is interesting in comparison to someone like the United States where it's only four times, well, only four times. We live in a country where actually only five years ago several major cities did a census and some of them found that up to 20, 23 or higher thousand people within their cities were actually technically malnourished, Leeds is a particular example. We also live in a country, in a world where there are some county, some administrative regions where the life expectancy differs by over a decade. This is the country we live in, and so our concerns about perhaps appearing tokenistic or our concerns about budget really pale in comparison to the desperate divisions and issues that are at work within our society. As designers, it is key to remember empathy is not enough. What is needed is a consistent engagement with the other, and I will put it bluntly because usually in design circles we tend to speak rather euphemistically. Let me say this, whoever you are as a designer, if you're designing a product, ensure that it is at least tested and used and considered in the context of someone as different from you as possible. If we have to be that literal, so be it, because that is what is needed, particularly in an age where our technologies, our designed environments are becoming ever smarter, ever more sophisticated, using reams of data which we don't fully know where they come from and gathering data from us in ways we don't fully understand. Empathy is not enough, and quite frankly, in the age of AI and big data powered chatbots and in an age where people are dreaming up direct interfaces between human brains and the internet and self-driving taxis to Mars, in an era of deep mind and deep learning, I think it's time that we started designing a little bit deeper. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.