Interaction 21: More Takeaways
I unfortunately missed Brenda Romero’s talk due to an important meeting, so I’ll have to watch the recording later, but I did catch the Q&A where she shared a few really interesting facts:
The only biography about Margaret Hamilton is a children’s book.
A woman invented the concept of pointers in 1952.
We’ve been able to inhabit a virtual body for over 40 years (in video games), but nobody has explored disability.
Dylan Thomas’s talk, Design for Cognitive Bias, contained a lot of good information, but my favorite bit was the explanation for how changing the framing of a conversation changes the entire conversation. He showed a photo of an elderly man sitting behind the steering wheel of a car and asked the question, “Should this person drive this car?” He then juxtaposed it with the question, “How could this person drive this car?” and finally posed the question, “How might we do a better job of moving people around?”
Nina Krishnan pointed out how design thinking fails us: “In the spirit of ‘rapid iteration’ we are incentivized to limit debate and discussion, not consider the ethical implications of design, and exclude historically marginalized communities from our processes.”
Ariba Jahan asked us to take the following pledge: “I, Jack, will not use my power to make decisions for a community that I don't share a lived experience with.”
Monika Bielskyte’s session, Protopia Futures, was pure poetry.
In his closing keynote, David Brin threw a lot of scary possibilities at us, but I appreciated his claim that while pessimists are proven right at first, optimists are always proven right in the end. He optimistically used the year 02021. “We know we are in early days. We are the primitive ancestors of much greater people down the road. We believe in a future, and we’re going to be good ancestors.”
That was an excellent note on which to end the conference.
