10.3. Why It Matters Who Designs#

10.3.1. Who gets designed for#

When designers and programmers don’t think to take into account different groups of people, then they might make designs that don’t work for everyone. This problem often shows up for how designs do or do not work for people with disabilities. But it also shows up in other areas as well.

The following tweet has a video of a soap dispenser that apparently was only designed to work for people with light-colored skin.1

Similarly, Twitter looked into bias in how their automatic image cropping algorithm worked.

10.3.2. Who gets to be designers#

In how we’ve been talking about accessible design, the way we’ve been phrasing things has implied a separation between designers who make things, and the disabled people who things are made for. And unfortunately, as researcher Cynthia Bennet points out, disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves, or even when they do participate in the design, they aren’t considered to be the “real designers.” You can see Cynthia’s research talk on this in the following Youtube Video:

1

If you can’t see the video, it shows someone with light skin putting their hand under a soap dispenser, and soap comes out. Then a person with dark skin puts their hand under a soap dispenser, and nothing happens. The person with dark skin then puts a white paper towel on their hand and then when they put their hand under the soap dispenser, soap comes out. When the person with dark skin takes off the white paper towel, the soap dispenser won’t work for them anymore.