I have interviewed a lot of #designers and #researchers this year. This is my round up of some of the issues I have seen in the industry in 2020:

1. Roughly 80% of the designers I speak to say something like “I haven’t had much opportunity to think about accessibility”...

Many organisations have cultural issues meaning they don’t prioritise accessibility. As a single designer, you can’t fix everything. But you always have the opportunity to make something more accessible than it otherwise would be if you don’t educate yourself or try at all.
2. About 40% of designers I speak to say “I don’t have a specific methodology I use”. In general, this is fine.

Except when it comes to research and problem framing. You don’t need a *single* approach or methodology, but you do need to be able to describe...
how you learn in a structured and reliable way.

You need to be able to describe how you frame a problem so the team can understand and get on board with it.

Design has to be a team sport when you’re working in multidisciplinary teams, and the problem needs to be shared.
NB: I include research here because lots of designers do it. But I rarely hear a researcher say “I don’t have a specific approach or methodology”.

Researchers work in a structured way to learn and communicate findings. There is a lot of good for designers to learn from here.
3. Many designers don’t understand the power of prototyping as a learning tool. Often they use a single tool for prototyping (e.g. Figma) and don’t have a grasp of how different approaches (paper, interactive, wizard of oz, code etc) allow them to learn...
different types of insight at different stages of the design process.

Often I think this is because the prototypes are really for stakeholders and developers, and aren’t used for research. Sometimes this is about the culture people are being forced to work in...
and organisations supposedly doing agile need to do a hell of a lot better here. Building things in small chunks is NOT the same as test and learn.

But for designers: test and learn needs to start before something reaches production build. Otherwise you expose users to...
unnecessarily poor experiences at scale, and you learn from your mistakes at their detriment.
4. Quite a few service designers I speak to still struggle to articulate their practice outside of the research and documentation (e.g. maps) they produce.

Strategy, service prototyping, and touchpoint design/direction are all things I want to see and hear more of...
Again, these limitations can be about the poor orgs/culture designers work in.

But as an industry I think we need to do more to move service design out of discovery mode (all research and theory) and into real implementation where the biggest impact of good design can be felt.
5. Less researchers than I would like are thinking about how to make their research inclusive. They understand they need to research with a variety of people, but this often doesn’t extend to factors like race, disability, LGBTQIA, tech confidence etc...
These groups represent different expectations, needs and experiences. Speaking to white folks based on age, binary gender and profession will give you a limited view of the people actually interacting with your product or service. This is especially critical in the public sector.
If you see yourself in this list, it’s ok. There was a time I didn’t know or care about these things either. As an industry we don’t teach these things, and many organisations don’t prioritise them.
But it’s worth learning about these approaches and practices. You won’t always get the opportunity to use them, but you’ll never get the opportunity to move your practice forward if you don’t learn that this thinking is out there.
If you have recommendations for good learning resources for some of the issues I have listed above post them below for folks coming to this thread!

More from Society

So, as the #MegaMillions jackpot reaches a record $1.6B and #Powerball reaches $620M, here's my advice about how to spend the money in a way that will truly set you, your children and their kids up for life.

Ready?

Create a private foundation and give it all away. 1/

Let's stipulate first that lottery winners often have a hard time. Being publicly identified makes you a target for "friends" and "family" who want your money, as well as for non-family grifters and con men. 2/

The stress can be damaging, even deadly, and Uncle Sam takes his huge cut. Plus, having a big pool of disposable income can be irresistible to people not accustomed to managing wealth.
https://t.co/fiHsuJyZwz 3/

Meanwhile, the private foundation is as close as we come to Downton Abbey and the landed aristocracy in this country. It's a largely untaxed pot of money that grows significantly over time, and those who control them tend to entrench their own privileges and those of their kin. 4

Here's how it works for a big lotto winner:

1. Win the prize.
2. Announce that you are donating it to the YOUR NAME HERE Family Foundation.
3. Receive massive plaudits in the press. You will be a folk hero for this decision.
4. Appoint only trusted friends/family to board. 5/
global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
I’ll address every nonsense argument and lie used to defend the suicidal gender ideology Thats in vogue today:

3:45 - “So what if you don’t have gametes?”

It’s called a birth defect. You’re still male or female.


~5:00 *nonsense trying to say the sexes of seahorses could be swapped coz male carry the eggs*

male doesn’t produce eggs, he produces the sperm. He’s still the male. If I impregnated a chick then carried the amniotic sac in a backpack ‘til the baby was done I’ll still be male🤦‍♂️

5:10 - we could say there’s 4 sexes of fruit fly cause there’s 3 producers of different sized sperm

No. They’re still producing sperm. They’re males. This is idiotic. Is this whole video like this? (Probably. 99% likely. Abandon hope.)

~6:10 - hermaphroditism and sequential hermaphroditism exists therefore....

No. Some animals being hermaphrodites, which is meaningless w/o the existence of binary sex to contrast it to, still doesn’t make gender ideology or transgenderism valid.

Intersex ≠ transgenderism 🙄

6:20 - bilateral gynandromorphism is a disorder in some species (not in humans). Has nothing to do w/ “gender” or transgenderism.

Ova-testes in humans are also a disorder, usually found in those w/ the karyotype disorders that you ppl also try to appropriate (extra X’s/Y’s).

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