Session type: Main Conference Talk

The urgency of ethics in design is now understood. In so many ways, design creates the world we depend on; (information) architecture creates the environments we live in. We’ve seen how technology is implicated in challenges to equality, human rights, dignity, justice, government, sustainability, and health. In IA, the concepts and language we choose are embedded in code, bringing our biases and assumptions with them. But what do I *do* about ethics at work? Do these issues apply? Where would I begin? How can I talk about it? What if I don’t have the power to change anything? What if the organization is stacked against it? And as a professional community, what should we be doing about ethics? How can we equip our members to address ethical issues in their work? This session combines a personal perspective with lessons learned from an online community for Ethical Technology founded two years ago at the 2017 IA Summit. We’ll look at design ethics through a systems thinking/theory lens. Design ethics means asking whether or not I’m doing the right thing as a designer. Systems thinking means recognizing that I’m working within a complex system where I don’t have full control over the consequences of my work—the ethical problems are too complex to analyze; my organization, as a whole, operates in ways that I can’t change. Ethical practice means uniting the personal with the global, knowing yourself while also recognizing your limitations. We’ll discuss:

• A systemic analysis of the ethical challenges designers face.
• Guiding principles for ethical practice in complex environments.
• Techniques for incorporating ethics into your work—whether by adding new methods, or by deepening the methods you already use.
• Recommendations on how our professional community can move forward with ethics as a core part of our field.

Although humans have many senses—between 9 and 33, not just five—we design primarily for just one sense: vision. How does activating multiple senses create richer experiences? And how can designers use this to create more meaningful and memorable interactions? This talk explores a few frameworks that help us think beyond vision and nudges us to understand embodied cognition. We’ll explore a few frameworks and how you might incorporate whole body thinking in your next project.

In a design system, all the elements of a design language can come together: interaction and visual guidelines, accessibility, brand, code, and content. That last element—content—is often absent from design systems. In this presentation, we talk about why content should be integrated into our design systems and how we go about doing it.

Customers usually come to our digital experiences to view or manage content, and yet design teams too often add content design and strategy as an afterthought. By placing content alongside the other design disciplines in a design system, we take a big step toward providing better customer experiences, we elevate the practice of content design, and we prepare our organizations for content innovations such as personalization and conversational user interfaces.

Drawing on content strategy practices like information architecture, content-first design, and governance, content professionals can help us enhance, test, and scale our design standards and how we communicate about them.

In addition to helping create robust components and patterns in the first place, content designers can make a number of other contributions to design systems:

• Editorial style

• Voice and tone

• Representative content for components

• Content patterns

• Brand guidelines

• Enhanced design documentation

In a world where funding is finite and ideas are bountiful, how do you persuade your stakeholders and decision makers that your recommendations are worth prioritizing? Selling the value of the work. The challenge is that few of us at IAC19 love to sell -- we love IA, research, UX, content strategy, etc -- and we’re generally not very good at selling because it's not where we've focused the effort in our careers. Due to this, IAs, UXers, Content Strategists, and Researchers are being poorly prepared. This lack of preparation and training means that we can't sell the benefits of how we know that we can help, slows down our career progression, and prevents us from being "at the table" with decision makers. The good news: It's possible to apply a low effort, high impact, human-centered framework that reframes “selling” as “problem solving" and applies personas to develop empathy with and get into the mindset of your stakeholders and decision makers. These personas are built by answering some simple questions:

• Who is the decision maker? This includes the potential creation of multiple personas and analysis of their needs.
• What is their greatest challenge and how are they being measured? This includes identification of big picture business issues that are both quantifiable as well as time bound.
• What kinds of problems are getting in their way of achieving the challenge? This focuses on the perspective of that individual and not the assumptions that we may have.
• What do they see as the solutions to those problems? Similarly, this is focused on the perspective of the stakeholder and not the assumptions we may walk into the conversation with.
• How would they be impacted by success (and failure)? This is where we measure value - both in business terms (save $4M) as well as personal terms (get promoted). This includes suggestions for how to estimate value based on increasing revenue, reducing costs, speed to market, mitigation of risk, etc.

By building out these profiles, we can much more easily speak the language of the stakeholders while focusing on what it is that we love doing best: solving problems.