Design for diversity
As designers, we are constantly confronted with diversity: when we undertake user research, when we choose which features to implement in a product or service. Making choices means selecting something at the expense of something else, which is the very meaning of discriminating.
As designers, our choices may contribute to reinforce stereotypes or to discriminate between categories of people who do not meet the standards of normality we are used to.
What is normality?
Normal: from the Latin norma, a noun that indicates the square (also called the rule), the instrument for measuring right angles, hence normalis = perpendicular, right.
Therefore, we can deduce how the idea of normality recalls that of rectitude, exactness, regularity. It has synonyms like usual, common, ordinary, average.
The concept of normality is mainly borrowed from medicine, where it is synonymous with healthy, natural. Hence the idea that all those who do not fall within the average, ordinariness and recurrence of certain psycho-physical characteristics, are sick.
This idea was reinforced in the 19th century, during the Second industrial revolution, when human beings and populations were observed, systematized, classified, analyzed with a scientific, statistical approach, with the ultimate goal of influencing their development and behavior.
At that time, Europe was experiencing the first wave of “big data” in history: nations started developing large-scale bureaucracies and militaries and began tabulating and publishing huge amounts of data about their citizenry, such as the number of births and deaths each month, the number of criminals incarcerated each year, the number of incidences of disease in each city… That was the inception of modern data collection.
In 1840, the belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet got the terrible idea of applying the scientific method to human beings. The goal was to obtain some average values to be represented in Gaussian curves: he declared that the individual person was synonymous with error, while the average person represented the true human being. That statement and that approach stayed until today, being reinforced over time by other theories, increasingly racist and discriminatory.
Still in 1962 the statistician William Youden explained the purpose and position of normal laws in science by presenting them as a calligram in the form of a bell curve:
THE
NORMAL
LAW OF ERROR
STANDS OUT IN THE
EXPERIENCE OF MANKIND
AS ONE OF THE BROADEST
GENERALIZATIONS OF NATURAL
PHILOSOPHY ♦ IT SERVES AS THE
GUIDING INSTRUMENT IN RESEARCHES
IN THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AND
IN MEDICINE AGRICULTURE AND ENGINEERING ♦
IT IS AN INDISPENSABLE TOOL FOR THE ANALYSIS AND THE
INTERPRETATION OF THE BASIC DATA OBTAINED BY OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENT
And here we are today, living in a society that gives priority to normality, designing our products and services mostly for white european successful neurotypical males (if you don’t know what neurotypical means, it is because you are).
Design for normality
Let’s go on with statistics: how many white European successful neurotypical males are there on Earth?
- Well, there are 7.834 billion people on Earth, of which 741 million people in Europe.
- Of 741 million, only 49% are men, so 363 millions.
- 14% of the population in Europe is formed by ethnic minorities, so we go down to 313 millions.
- 44 million people in Europe have basic activity difficulties, 35 million people have a disability in employment, 42 million people are disabled, so we go down to 192 million people.
- The at-risk-of-poverty rate is around 17%, we go down to 160 million people.
When we design for normality, we are designing for 160 million people, meaning 20% of the population. The majority is not average.
This means that designing for the average, for normality is not only bad for ethics, since you shape behaviors and influence cultures according to the bias of a very small group of people, but for business too, because you don’t eat 80% of the cake.
That makes no sense.
What is diversity?
Diversity is the most natural thing there is — as opposed to normality, which does not even exist in nature.
Complex systems are the more resilient the greater the diversity they welcome: the very survival of a complex system is granted by the ability of its elements to evolve, adapt and diversify.
As human beings, we are part of a larger system and diversity is also essential for us to survive, although we often tend to forget it.
“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
For humans, diversity can take many forms: from biological differences (physiognomy, physical or intellectual abilities,…), to social ones (income, status, job,…), behavioral (being rebellious or conformist, solitary or extroverted,…) or cultural (place of birth, religion, habits,…).
Dissent is also a form of diversity, too often not considered during user search or while working in project teams.
A company embracing and valuing diversity is therefore more resilient too: enlisting diverse perspectives means focusing additional sets of uniquely-trained eyes on the horizon, scanning for what may lie ahead. While it’s impossible to predict all the changes that will impact our company in five years, tapping a broader spectrum of insights means that we will be more equipped and resilient when encountering change.
Companies that value diversity are also more innovative: they can see more angles on potential problems, speak more readily to the complexity of those problems, imagine more intelligent solutions, and spot the biases in what they’re creating.
For all these reasons, diversity must be observed, understood, preserved and valued.
Truly considering diversity versus disability means shifting from pity to inspiration, from a fixing attitude (typical of designers, by the way) to an empathy attitude, based on true listening. Because wishing to fix something is equal to saying that something is wrong, broken. But it’s not. It’s just different.
The enemies of diversity
Two natural enemies of diversity are bias and illusory superiority, that was easy.
But despite good intentions, when applying accessibility principles we may also reinforce discrimination if we treat the subject as something to be optimized later, apart.
For example when we design a separate accessible version of a website, or specific features for accessibility, we are pointing out the difference. It is the modern equivalent of fountains where only African Americans could drink in South Carolina in 1938 (apartheid means separation, after all).
Inclusivity may have some traps too.
The word comes from the latin in claudere, meaning to close. It refers to the act of closing people or things in a set, letting them fit into something.
Inclusion is therefore in itself a practice that does not value diversity, because it forces those who are “included” to comply with something that has been designed for someone else.
The word inclusion has always made me think of social groups at school: the idea of starting from the assumption that anyone would want to join them has always made me angry.
Inclusion is a principle that goes hand in hand with equality (giving everyone the same things), but not with equity (giving everyone the same opportunities).
There are entire labs dedicated to first researching an established trend, and then designing to reinforce it. Design for equity requires the reflection and disruption of the mainstream references that reinforce inequitable access to resources.
This also applies to the supply chain, ensuring that people along the full chain of materials and manufacturing are valued, paid fairly and respected.
Inclusivity may be an ethical pitfall also because it is too often used as a brand enhancer, rather than a sharing vector: companies wish to communicate on their inclusivity-oriented activities, but the true target for this communication are mostly average people, whilst those “included” are just the topic, the show off.
Good stuff to deep dive
(Book) Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez
(Book) The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose
(Book) Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling by Edgar H. Schein
(Article) The Atlantic, The Invention of the normal person: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-invention-of-the-normal-person/463365/
(Blog) Acuity Design, the blog by Alastair Somerville, sensory designer: https://acuity-design.medium.com
(Community) The Disabled List by Liz Jackson: https://www.disabledlist.org/
(Project) Critical Axis, a community driven project collecting and analyzing disability representation in media: https://www.criticalaxis.org/
