Event Recordings

"Hope is a discipline." - Mariame Kaba
‍

When I look out into the UX community, I see a tired community, I see a frustrated community, I see a part of the community who has grown tired of all this talk around being human-centered while working in environments that struggle to be truly human-centered in ways that acknowledge privilege, power, and injustice.There is plenty to critique  — but there is plenty to hope for too. Let's lean into both together.

Critique is a signal of hope.

Ethics has become a buzzword in the design industry. But what happens when our dedication to ethical “best practices” is nothing more than a performance, a way to spotlight our goodness while masking harm? If we truly want to challenge the status quo, we need to lift the curtain on ethical theater.There is plenty to critique — but there is plenty to hope for too. Let's lean into both together.

Can we design ourselves out of crisis?

We live in a world of constant crisis. As our design work fails to respond to—and in some cases even actively causes—societal harm, we must push through the hopelessness and cultivate a new set of skills and practices. We often talk about how to develop a better work ethic. But what if instead we focused on how to develop a better future ethic and a commitment to designing futures that don’t yet feel possible?

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.