Tragic Design

Foreword

Much of what Shariat and Savard Saucier write in this book, I might not have fully understood at all if I’d never left the academy. Leaving wonderful places like MIT and RISD to join the world of industry isn’t what good, pure “thought leaders” normally do, but all of my interactions with the new kinds of designers emerging in the technology industry made me think my thoughts weren’t really good enough anymore. So I’ve been busy filling up my brain with the many new experiences that I’ve gained by working in Silicon Valley at a thankfully late stage in my career. I say this with gratitude because I would have hated to have lived my entire life in the untouchable Ivory Tower without knowing what I do today. What have I learned about the future in Silicon Valley working in venture capital and advising technology companies? That the impact of Moore’s Law—the doubling of computing power every 18 months—is still making its way to people around the world. But the mitigating factor for technology’s real impact in people’s lives isn’t a technical one of speed, scale, or power. It isn’t a matter measured in gigahertz, terabytes, or nanopixels—it is instead the pursuit of satisfying human needs for comprehensibility, ease of use, and emotional fit in our digital experiences today. It is a matter of purposefully designing superior solutions with technology that can empower and support humans.

Where are the designers for these new directions to be found? I find that a lot of them are in the startup community—specifically, in companies whose CEOs and cofounders lead their ventures with a designer’s penchant for disrupting the status quo while centering their businesses’ objectives around what people want and need, rather than solely what new technologies can make possible. They are people like designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who reframed the hospitality industry (https://www.airbnb.com) as a distributed network of bedrooms in people’s own houses to rent like hotel rooms. Or the nondesigner CEOs of public companies like John Donahoe, who formerly led eBay Inc. to adopt design thinking at the executive level across his companies. Or people like Marissa Vosper and Lauren Schwab, cofounders of tiny New York–based apparel startup Negative Underwear (https://negativeunderwear.com), where technical fabrics are used to achieve fit and aesthetic needs that male lingerie designers have long overlooked. If you would like to learn more about this phenomenon, just look at the Design in Tech Reports (http://DesignIn.Tech) from the past three years; you’ll see that the impact of design in the technology industry is truly growing.

But with great impact comes great failures too. The many tragedies described in this book are evident throughout the technology industry, and to see them summarized in the way that Shariat and Savard Saucier present them is truly disheartening. And unfortunately, because of the way that the design profession is taught in the academy today, driven primarily by aesthetics and in the absence of testing or other data gathering, we’ll likely see even more tragedies introduced through our apps, screens, and assorted IoT devices. For that reason, this book appears at an opportune time to encourage designers of all skill levels to break their honed Bauhausian biases, abandon their fine-tuned taste-o-meters, and bridge a path to the kind of vital, tragedy-preventing design that Shariat and Savard Saucier propose. I feel lucky that I get to put many of these principles into practice at Automattic (https://automattic.com).

What does design have to do with “inclusion”? I think that will become fully evident as you read through this book. Digital technology used to be available only to “computer nerds”—but now, because of smartphones, digital technology is accessible to everyone. So it now needs to be considered from an inclusive viewpoint, encompassing the full variety of human beings that live on this planet, and not just highly skilled computer types. This revolution is just beginning, and it’s exciting to have Shariat and Savard Saucier’s book to ground the growing movement of achieving truly inclusive design in the digital era.

John Maeda is Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic Inc. He is a Strategic Advisor to venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has led research teams at the MIT Media Lab, and was the 16th president of the Rhode Island School of Design. His work is represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.