DAHL Inclusivity Project

The problem[s]

Warwick University was founded sixty years ago, with its early ambitions shaped by Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech (1963). The computer boom of the 80s, and the invention of the World Wide Web in the 90s re-awakened our techno-utopian imaginings. Globally interconnected computers (long before smart phones and tablets) were going to be liberatory and empowering for everyone. Extending our reach, our connections, supercharging individual and collective memory, enabling more rational thought stripped of human frailties. Things could only get better!

Well that's how we used to think.

Zoom forwards in the timeline to 2025, and a utopian vision is proving harder to conjure up.

Douglas Adams wrote that "technology is the name we give to things that don't work properly yet."

We are still struggling with technology all the time, in many ways (and not just because it doesn't work properly). Less of the world now seems to be naturally there, just working, fitting us like a glove. Problems, problems, problems.

John Seeley-Brown and Mark Weisser (who some say invented the modern world at the Palo Alto Research Centre) agreed, arguing that technology should become seamlessly embedded into our lives, ubiquitously, and only becoming apparent through "calm" interfaces when necessary. Computers should help us to think, but not unnecessarily make us think when we have to deal with their bad design (Krug, 2000).

And yet we spend so much time trying to get a simple Word file to print.

Of course there were other big issues overlooked - utopianism has that effect.

Unable to transfer a file from your iPad to your work computer? Classic first-world problem. You're lucky to even have an iPad, and a work computer, and reliable electricity. Many people around the world, including here within a wealthy University and its local area, are excluded from even the most meagre crumbs of techno-utopia.

Or maybe you don't even want to use an iPad. Mistrust of big tech is entirely understandable, and spreading exponentially, mirroring the spread of AI into every bit of our lives.

Sometimes exclusion is derived directly from lack of financial resource. But we also know that the necessary knowledge, to even know what systems and skills to obtain, is unfairly distributed through inter-personal networks. Wealthy people have more opportunity to try and learn. Networks of wealthy people combine to generate cultural and intellectual capital far surpassing their needs. Their spending power skews the directions in which products and services are developed.

Some people are less better connected by no fault of their own. They have less access to knowledge, opportunity, power and influence. Worse still, systems are designed following neurotypical and cultural assumptions, often deeply embedded into technology designer cultures. For example, people who design software for students spend most of their lives sitting at nice desks in quiet offices with banks of big high resolution screens. Students, on the other hand, have highly mobile days, often struggling to find somewhere to set up to work on a small laptop screen. Some may spend significant down-time on busses (WBS long ago discovered that podcasting is a good fit in these cases, it's easier to listen than watch on an unsteady bus journey). Other assumptions are just as damaging. Many systems are designed by people who have significant time to be familiar with the interfaces and workflows. And yet the end users might only use them sporadically - for example a teacher who uses an assessment system just a few times a year. Such a system needs interfaces and workflows that are instantly recognisable and memorable. But designers too familiar with their own systems rarely design for this sporadic use.

Very little good research has been undertaken to identify these hard to pin down discriminations. Lucy Suchman (a great anthropologist who worked at PARC with Sealey-Brown and Weisser), warned of the dangers in her paper "Anthropological Relocations" - a new colonialism. We can see that now in the behaviour of Big Tech, but also in the day-to-day impacts of their design decisions. For example, we know that a minority (the usual suspects) will make the most of our LinkedIn Learning training provision. But for many others, for a variety of reasons, it just does not fit. It is aligned to a certain kind of self-motivated instrumentalist, perhaps more common in business schools. What might we do to make it fit better? How might we design ways of using it, an excellent resource, so as everyone feels comfortable and benefits?

We need to do more. Many people are being excluded. It starts with getting to know each other better, our differences and similarities, and empowering the collective re-design of our technological world.

Imagining and designing for a better world

Design Thinking is an approach that takes designing out of the studio, spends significant time getting to know the diversity of real people in real situations, and redistributes design agency, the power to make decisions, to the people who will be impacted by those decisions. This is not simple. It gets complicated when we have to find ways to deal with significant differences. But in the long term, even when we get it wrong we can learn, adapt, and refine our shared idea of what the world should be like.