Day: 8 August 2019

Todd Rose – The Star

The failure of product and service design to reflect human variety has been made more visible by work such as Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women and Joy Buolamwini’s work on racist algorithms. Those are important and very necessary perspectives, but in a way they are both special cases of a much more general problem. There is a bad assumption implicit in many of the choices and decisions they and others write about that the average person is a white, middle class, middle aged male. But one of the reasons it is possible to fall into the trap of making that assumption is the more fundamental assumption that it is useful to think in terms of averages in the first place.

This article is a few years old, but it holds up well as a challenge to that assumption, in two important ways. The first and more straightforward is the demonstration that across more than a tiny handful of characteristics, nobody is average for all (or even most) of them. It follows that designing for the average is designing for nobody, not designing for everybody.

The second is that even then, facts are not neutral. There’s a good response to that evidence, which is that pretty much everything has to be to designed in a way which fits systems to individuals, not individuals to systems. But there is also a bad response, which is that if people fail to be average, they should work to remedy their deficiencies. And to complete the circle, it’s probably not altogether a coincidence that the example illustrating the first response is about men, and the example illustrating the second is about women.