Session notes: Interactive Keynote: Social Change by Design

Denise Jacobs, Founder + CEO at The Creative Dose, closed out Enterprise Experience 20 with a powerful interactive keynote on Social Change by Design.

Awaken

She began by sharing a story of working at a software company in the 90s. During a meeting to discuss a website refresh, the white female manager recommended making the buttons “flesh-colored.” To which Denise asked “what color?” as a clarification.

What would you have done? 

Oftentimes, people do nothing. The first step is to be aware and awake.

Racism is by design. There’s no way to counter it without design.

It’s time to listen. Really listen.

“Most of the time people don’t listen well. They don’t get to depth – they stay stuck at the surface.” – Indi Young at Enterprise Experience 20

Renee Reid on allyship

Renee Reid, Staff UX Design Researcher at LinkedIn, shared her experience with reflecting on the question “what would have happened if I wasn’t there?” in situations where stakeholders propose situations that are offensive or misrepresentation of a culture. She is often the only individual in a room who recognizes these issues and speaks up.

Yet, being the only voice creates fatigue.

Many champion allyship, but how does it show up in your day-to-day? Renee closed her talk by stating she appreciates allyship when she’s in the same room. She appreciates it, even more, when she’s not in the room.

Lisa Welchman on bias

Lisa Welchman, Speaker, Consultant, Coach on Digital Governance has been a maker and entrepreneur for over 25 years.  Sadly, bias has often sucked the joy out of her vocation. While working at a large web content management company in 1998, she had a great conversation with a manager regarding scaling web content management. Then the manager said that it was too bad that Lisa was “too black and ugly.”
She ultimately left that company and started her own consultancy focused on digital and web governance in the 2000s.  This was pre-big-bandwidth and social media, so deals were closed through the phone without clients seeing photographs of Lisa and her team on their website. Clients often did see Lisa until they met in person. Frequently, the clients assumed her white colleague was the boss. A client from the Middle East once requested a white male to deliver the work Lisa had done. Lisa frequently has to explain why she is backstage at events, even as a featured speaker. An individual insisted that Lisa’s white manager wrote the book that Lisa had recently published.
These experiences build up like plaque in arteries.
It’s institutionalized and systematic. People of color are punished just for existing.

Nancy Douyon on making a difference

Nancy Douyon, Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher at Douyon Signature, shared stories from her journey of striving to beat racism. As a child from Haiti, she learned coding, design, and 3D development at age 11. She went on to attend college at MIT. While Nancy experienced bias in college, it became most clear at her first job in an enterprise. Her manager provided lightweight tasks to her under the assumption she couldn’t handle challenges but assigned harder projects to her Asian colleague. When Nancy worked on redesigning a Quality Assurance system that saved the company millions without letting her boss know, he was upset.

Nancy thought she could beat racism by being smart enough. It didn’t work.

Later in her career, Nancy worked at a company that had just undergone a reorg. At a company function, a director asked Nancy to leave citing it was a private event. When Nancy stated that she was part of the team, the director replied “why don’t I know you” and asked Nancy to introduce herself to everyone. The next day, her manager arranged a meeting with HR, who provided her with a severance package. She was fired. When HR asked, “what do you want?”, Nancy replied harassment training and the end of inappropriate behavior. They replied, “you can’t punish everybody for one person…”

Nancy vowed to stay in the industry and make a difference–to build products that are better for EVERYONE.

Feeling the weight

After these emotional stories, Denise invited attendees to truly feel the weight and discomfort shared by the speakers. Then imagine feeling this all the time. Know that many individuals experience this every day. Sit with the feeling. Empathize.

Activating design

As designers, we are change agents. We have skillsets and passions to make things better. How might we create meaningful, lasting change? Attendees of the keynote broke out into rooms and addressed the following prompts.

Leverage the methodologies that you already know as part of your profession to talk about how you might solve this issue, making sure that you go beyond the typical solutions that haven’t been working.

  • What can you do inside yourself?
  • What can you do within your team or organization?
  • What can you/we do inside the professional UX community?

Attendees then rejoined the main room with the encouragement to reflect on…

  • What came up within your group?
  • What came up within you?
  • What did you find?
  • How did you manage your discomfort?

Starling murmuration

Denise concluded with imagery of starling murmurations–the flocking phenomenon we see in birds. Birds take cues from the seven birds nearest to them. Humans are similar – we take cues from each other and all the lessons we’ve absorbed throughout our lives. How might we think deeper, push ourselves, and challenge ourselves? Then amplify and echo forward together.