HPW Blog Post Reflection
By Tara And Hannah
Reflecting on the past few weeks of classes, Hannah and I wanted to discuss and expand on some of the main takeaways and questions we had regarding the topics covered in human cognition, inclusivity, and the relation of design to social justice.
We understood that the main purpose of understanding human cognition was to optimize interactions through design. In my psychology classes, we learned about memory recall and heuristics. I remember how the brain constantly processes information and so has the tendency to cut corners when it comes to thinking and decision making. In my class, we did an experiment based on Availability Heuristics, a term coined by psychologists Tversky and Kahneman. The term refers to the ability to determine the likelihood of situations based on how easily and quickly we can come up with past examples of the same. This could then cause a lack of judgment in decision-making processes which leads to the construction of systemic biases. In design, by reducing the decisions the user has to make we can eliminate decision fatigue and reduce the user’s need to recall past experience to figure out how to interact with objects or software. In addition to this, in product design, if your product is trying to solve a problem, it should be built in a way that presents itself as the most obvious solution to the customer.
Building on that thought, I began thinking about the limitations to making products that are the “most obvious solution to the customer”. This is so much harder said than done. In our Inclusivity lecture, we learned about how what seems obvious to one user, might not be obvious to someone else because the idea of normality is really just an illusion. The paradox of inclusivity made me realize that we should keep this question of fairness in mind and through research and positive responses to interactions, we can make thoughtful design decisions that will make a good, lasting impact on users.
Further, it was interesting how Hillary Carey, who worked within the context of anti-racism, offered a kind of alternative to human-centered design. Even something that seems so beneficial is not perfect. Human-centered design does not cover or apply to everything. She thinks we’ve been trained to focus too heavily on individual behavior instead of addressing systemic inequity within designed structures. It was refreshing to hear she viewed a lot of what is currently being done to address social inequality, like education programs and redesigning websites, as not doing enough. However, her lecture and story also led me to a few critical questions. Carey started her design career working with huge conglomerates like Google and Kaiser Permanente, before later moving to the work of antiracism. These are corporations founded and operated on capitalistic notions of racism, violence, and inequity. I’m wondering how her time spent with these corporations influenced her transition to the work she does now? She also mentioned in her lecture that she didn’t think critically about race for the first 30 years of her life. Does she ever feel inadequate doing this work or feels that she should leave this work to someone who actually experiences racism or at least someone who’s been working against it for longer than she has?
The lectures and activities made us reflect and question several things about human interaction and the relationship between human-centered design and issues around justice. Overall, we realized the largeness of the scope of how human cognition impacts interactions and that a core understanding and awareness of it is immensely important as designers to make thoughtful designs that are not detrimental but beneficial to society.