The power of us: Empathy isnt enough

Brian Russel Davis shares a radical proposition: if we empower groups to understand design for themselves, we may be able to usher in a new era of UX curation, a space where groups design their own experiences without total dictation from designers and where designers learn new ways of interfacing with communities that may have been otherwise outside their reach.

Empathy is great, but it’s often limited by implicit bias. Much of our bias starts in our language, in terms and concepts that we learn at a very young age. This has implications for content, making it important to ask who curates our content and who decides what is important information in an application. Early on, Pandora’s design team tried to empower groups to curate their own content. Allowing users to curate their playlists was novel at the time, but Pandora quickly learned that opening the process up to more people created better results. Brian Russel Davis shares a radical proposition learned from this process: if we empower groups to understand design for themselves, we may be able to usher in a new era of UX curation, a space where groups design their own experiences without total dictation from designers and where designers learn new ways of interfacing with communities that may have been otherwise outside their reach. This session is sponsored by Axiom88.