Towards an Intersectional Design Practice: Intersectional Research Design
One of our values here at Made by Many is humility. And the reason for that is that we recognise we don’t have all the answers, and instead strive to iterate on our process to make it better, fairer, and more effective every day. Key to this, we have always believed (and been proven right), is making our design practice more inclusive–from who we hire to what we produce. It’s that which has inspired this dive into intersectional design.
Fortunately for us, some incredibly talented researchers have already been looking at this– work that is loosely labelled under the umbrella of ‘Design Justice’. A methodology and philosophical approach that seeks to uplift marginalised voices and mitigate harm that may occur at the hand of our design choices.
Sasha Costanza-Chock (MIT) does an excellent job of explaining this approach in full here. What’s clear is that these principles need to be manifest in every area–from the organisational level, to staff representation, participant diversity, launch plans, and whose histories are remembered when we think about design.
For this reason I’ve split this bit of writing into roughly four parts under a series I’ll call ‘Towards Design Justice’, which despite being separate, often interlink with one another:
- Intersectional research design - Who are your participants and how are you designing with them?
- What values do we encode/(re)produce in our design and products?
- Representation at the organisational level - Who gets to do the design?
- Design history - Whose work is remembered?
Over the next weeks I’ll be going into each of these in more detail and shedding some light on how they can be applied specifically to a product design process: what we’re already doing at Made by Many and what more we could be. This first one will focus on:
Intersectional research design
As I’m sure will be familiar to some of you, Caroline Criado Perez did a fantastic job explaining where women and gender non-conforming people have been erased in research, industrial design, and healthcare in her book ‘Invisible Women’. Perez’s work set in motion an important cultural recognition of how data is imbued with biases and how these ultimately affect economic, social, and health outcomes for women. A similar thing happens with design, which both conceptually and in practice, carries bias with it. This series will think about conventional and normative design practices, and what we can do as practitioners to make them more inclusive.
What is important about this work, is striving for a truly intersectional design process. By that I’m using the definition of 'intersectional' to mean recognising the ways different forms of oppression, including on racialised, gendered, or other terms, intersect and create the realities of individuals, and aspiring to lessen the burden certain people experience over others. Therefore it is a design process that acknowledges and incorporates the lived experiences of different groups, particularly those typically on the margins–all the way from team organisation to ideation to launch.
Standpoint theory and the privileged position
There is the notion of ‘standpoint theory’ in feminist literature, a concept which describes how your perspective and insights are determined by your specific environment. This is particularly important to consider when we think about privileged standpoints, and how these can make invisible the experiences and insights of marginalised groups. As designers and product people who typically operate from a place of economic and social privilege, this recognition is essential.
As design justice is concerned with how design choices can(re)produce structural and personal inequalities, it’s crucial to understand what those inequalities are and how they manifest. To do this you need to speak to real people with actual lived experience at the hands of them. AKA create an intersectional research design–both in terms of who you speak to and how you do that–that makes these perspectives known.
Alison Place discusses this with scholar Aimi Hamraie in ‘Feminist Designer: On the Personal and the Political’. Aimi talks about frameworks for disability design and the concept of ‘Critical Design’, a design approach and methodology that looks to produce discomfort and antagonise a normate user, to highlight what an average experience for a disabled person might be and problematise what is too often taken for granted in design.
The point of this approach is to encourage designers to centre disability discourse in their design process and shift the focus away from making things just “accessible” as an afterthought, and instead entirely designed from the perspective of a disabled person.
An essential part of getting to the point of antagonising a normative design, is understanding how it is normative in the first place. Which is why it is crucial to hear the voices of marginalised people, whether that be disabled, trans, or racialised groups, who often have their perspectives invisibilised for several reasons–one of which is designing the user-research to be not inclusive in the first place.
Take the example of using an online user-research platform to conduct testing. Who is missed when you move a process online? Who might have accessibility needs that can’t be catered for on a certain platform? Or who might not have access to a device at all? The same can be asked for in-person research, who has the ability, resources, and time, to go to an in-person session? Whose voices go unheard? These are questions those in Design Justice implore us to ask ourselves when thinking about how we conduct design research.
Moving from the “default” user to the “marginal” user
This problem is typically conceptualised as having a "default user" in mind when designing, one that assumes they are white, cisgender, straight, wealthy, and educated. An alternative to which Shaowen Bardzell suggests, is the “marginal user”, which as Alison Place writes, “complicates notions of universal design and implies a new set of strategies and methods needed for user research.”
Some of these methods include placing greater value on qualitative research over quantitative, and designing with users “for the long-haul”. These, I can say with confidence, have always been integral to the design process at Made by Many. And we’ve seen the benefits they reap for users and innovation alike.
Qualitative research is the bread and butter of our discovery process, long-form interviews every member of the team are part of, human-led synthesis, and using numbers to supplement, rather than direct us. On co-creation, we advocate for bringing stakeholders in from ideation to launch, working alongside users at every stage and leaving our biases at the door as best we can. This often looks like all-day workshops held both online and in-person during discovery; extensive guided user-research during the prototype phase; and endless iteration based on feedback.
Other things these books have drawn our attention to is the idea of “starting at the margins”, centering those users who are often overlooked and creating a more nuanced and elaborated “default user” in our minds and practice, something we can always do more of. This should evolve with time and reject universality, and be central to discussion on research design.
An example of how we practice this already is to create participant samples that are truly diverse–not just statistically representative. The reason for this, as explained above, is that a sample that may be representative of the population, will naturally diminish the lived experiences of minority groups. Instead we like to use platforms like Maze, which allow us to define our sample groups to include diversity across a huge number of often overlooked social demographic characteristics, including employment status, household income, gender identity, educational background, health status. Of course, this is an imperfect solution, but it is a step in the right direction.
Final remarks
In the next part of this series I’ll be looking at what values we consciously and unconsciously encode in our designs, products, and services, how we can mitigate further embedding inequalities, and tie this back to how centering marginalised voices helps us to do that.
I’ll finish with a quote from Sasha, who writes:
“Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.”
It’s up to us as designers, strategists, and product people to help to try and change that.
