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Critical UX: Challenging the Dogma of UX
Every field has them: those seemingly non-negotiable approaches that have been anointed by industry pioneers as “truth.” But when we look past the personally branded orthodoxies and competition for relevance, we can begin to see how some design “best practices” have done just as much harm as they have good.
To recoup design’s potential for real and lasting change, we need to go back to basics and challenge the dogma of UX.
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This event was designed for you to:
Stretch your ethic of imagination, creativity, and curiosity
Have much-needed, overdue we-ain’t-afraid-to-go-there conversations
Attend a budget-friendly event with more innovative, practical takeaways than an over-priced conference
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Critical UX: Challenging the Dogma of UX
3 thought-provoking panels with American Sign Language interpreters and CART services
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Panel #1: The Dogma of Inclusion
Within design, we’ve seen a movement towards including users from historically marginalized groups into the research and design process. But what are the conditions of this inclusion and how can it result in even more exclusionary design? This panel brings together design professionals resisting superficial inclusion by rooting their practice in the friction of their identities.
- How can inclusive practices become exclusionary?
- What does it mean to design through race, disability, or queerness?
- How can we recognize patterns of lived experience without stereotyping or homogenizing?
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Alex Haagaard is a design researcher whose practice is driven by their (auto)ethnographic study of disability and, especially, invalidism. They reclaim the term "invalid" and pursue "invalidating" as a clinically invisibilized parallel to "cripping." Alex has spent the last 5 years consulting with companies and academic institutions on how to do meaningful disability-engaged design research. They are now shifting the focus of their practice in the hope of applying their skills toward the pursuit of health justice.
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Florence Okoye is a User Experience and Service designer, independent researcher and facilitator whose work focusses on using community centred methods for designing in complex systems. She has designed digital services across a range of sectors, with her work in community centred design focusing on using AfroFuturism and speculative design to generate approaches that can create resilient, holistic and adaptable services. Her research interests centre on questions of radical and just means of accessing and sharing information, ranging from enquiries into neighbourhood designed smart cities, modelling open access to archives and collections to worker-led interventions with automated systems and AfroFuturist inspired civics engagement.
Driven by their background in cultural anthropology and experiences living on four continents, Es Braziel (they/them) is a qualitative researcher and strategist focused on mitigating harm from emerging technologies and creating digital spaces for people from marginalized backgrounds. They currently lead the Product Equity research practice at Adobe, where they define and drive research that ensures Adobe's products enable "Creativity for all." They have previously applied their strategic lens to responsible product innovation at Microsoft and community-led projects.
Panel #2: The Dogma of Universality
Heuristics. Standards. “Good design” not only requires we follow certain conventions rooted in Eurocentric thinking but also encourages us to continue building and maintaining tools of colonization. During this panel, we’ll grapple with what it means to decolonize design and how to translate that to material change beyond metaphor.
- What are the limits and possibilities of decolonizing design in capitalistic systems?
- Given the different histories of colonization, what are the various ways we can decolonize design?
- How can calls for decolonizing design lead to cultural appropriation?
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Dr noopur Raval is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and an incoming assistant professor in Information Studies at UCLA. Her past and ongoing work looks at how technology design shapes the future of work and the experiences of tech workers trying to bring about change within their organizations.
Lesley-Ann Noel was trained as an Industrial Designer at the Universidade Federal do Paraná. She holds a PhD in Design from North Carolina State University and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of the West Indies. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor with a focus in Design Studies in the Department Media Arts Design and Technology at North Carolina State University. She practices primarily in the area of social innovation, education and public health. She is co-Chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society. She is one of the editors of The Black Experience in Design for Allworth (2022).
Ahmed Ansari is an Industry Assistant Professor at the Integrated Design and Media program at NYU Tandon. He has a PhD in Design Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a masters in Interaction Design, and a bachelors in Communication Design from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. His research interests intersect between design studies and history, philosophy of technology, and critical cultural studies, particularly studies of decolonization and globalization, with an area focus on visual and material culture in the Indian subcontinent.
Panel #3: The Dogma of Individualism
Whether it’s designing for delight or usability, designers are primed to address the pain points of their users. But when we only focus on individual-level problems, we can fail to account for the complex and even contradictory needs of the communities, governments, and ecosystems we’re embedded in. For this panel, we’ll talk with researchers and designers working in the community organizing, civic government, and sustainability space to discuss what it takes to design for and disrupt our interdependent systems.
- What type of tools and methodologies can we use to forecast the long-term and macro-level impact of our designs?
- What are the different ways designers can (and should) relate to scale?
- How do we identify and harness the right inflection points to intervene in systems?
Cyd Harrell serves as San Francisco’s second Chief Digital Services Officer and is the author of the 2020 book A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide. Her work has spanned the civic tech space from federal to local and executive to judicial, and she continues to work from a UX perspective as a general manager. Cyd is fascinated by the systems behind our experiences with institutions & has spent the past decade working to redesign them; she is still learning how how we as communities can do this.
Andrea Ngan is a design strategist, researcher, facilitator, and media artist. Her practices nurture social and spatial justice initiatives co-led by community and youth. She initiated Creative Resilience Collective, Creative Resilient Youth, and Design Justice Network’s Philadelphia Node. As a founding team member of the City of Philadelphia’s Service Design Studio, Andrea is also co-leading the development of a citywide Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit to transform how the City repairs relationships and works with historically excluded and harmed communities.
Madhuri Karak (she/her) is a researcher, writer, podcaster, and strategist living between Ankara, Turkey and Kolkata, India. She has supported indigenous land defenders, small-scale fishers and farmers, environmental policy practitioners, behavioral scientists, and digital rights activists to secure and manage the commons for collective wellbeing. She is especially interested in propulsive multiple-format storytelling that will move the needle on complex social justice challenges. Madhuri was a Mellon - American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (2019-2021) and has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
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and challenge the dogma of UX.
- Access to 3 recordings of thought-provoking panels with practical insights, key quotes, and transcripts
- Practical insights and takeaways
- Additional resources relevant to the topics discussed during the panels and more!
$20
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The Dogma of Inclusion
Within design, we’ve seen a movement towards including users from historically marginalized groups into the research and design process. But what are the conditions of this inclusion and how can it result in even more exclusionary design? This panel brings together design professionals resisting superficial inclusion by rooting their practice in the friction of their identities.
- How can inclusive practices become exclusionary?
- What does it mean to design through race, disability, or queerness?
- How can we recognize patterns of lived experience without stereotyping or homogenizing?