Thread by @RohanIrvine

Closing keynote for day 1

Liz Jackson — Engaging in disability as a creative practice

#UXAustralia #UXA2019 #uxa19

While we're watching this video from this tweet, how does it make you feel?

Maybe you're inspired?
Maybe some faith in humanity?

If your blind you may say this add makes you feel a little different, exploited. But it has no audio. So it's not for them. So who's it for?

Nike made an add about a disabled athlete.

The add was launched on world cerebral palsey — Nike 'surprised' Justin with a contract.

They told everyone that he didn't deserve the same professional contract signing abled athletes do.

Again, not made for disabled folk

Microsoft made an ad about their Xbox adaptive controller.

The group of disabled gamers hacked and built accessible controllers.

That's not the story Microsoft rolled out in their media and further marginalised disabled gamers.

Liz created a website to track use of disabled people in advertising.

The more true words a disabled person spoke the less credible it was perceived.

The things disabled people fight for and create are consistently turned into 'an empathetic thing done for them'

Disabled people's innovation has changed the world and it is consistently erased.

Finger works was a touch interface created by a disabled innovator. Steve Jobs bought this technology to create a touch UI.

Liz created With.

In co-design the institutions decide when and how disabled people participate.

In WITH disabled people insert them self in a process.

This is to stop the exploitation of disabled innovators.

The way brands tell stories about disabled people are not our (disabled people's) stories.

Liz is talking about how disabled people are held up as good deeds for other people.

Disabled people need you to interrogate the things that you hold up as wholesome.

How is it you get brands to pay attention and do something differently.

Liz wants @ideo to take notice and start doing things differently.

She created Design Questioning in response to Design Thinking.

Much good has come from design thinking but it has fuelled that disabled people are receipients of not drivers of design.

Stopped taking the ideas and innovations from disabled folk and selling it back to them without credit.

So what is empathy?

It's been around since 1909 and is derived from a German word.

When a person goes into a museum and encounters a piece of art, people are physically moved by works of greatness.

This then evolved into pity.

The current process of empathy is leading to three outcomes.

1. Reified power structures
— The empathiser becomes the centre of the conversation
2. Prescribes emotions
3. Silences the recipient

Tim Brown thinks the term Design Thinking has downsides to it.

Design thinking credits the thinker.

We are taught to empathise, to think of.

We are actually being taught to Think For.

Suddenly we are arbitures of what is good.

Thinking is elitists.

Who gets to be the thinker
Are they actually doing the thinking or do they just get the credit

Disability didn't exist before industrialisation.

They would be in the communities doing what they could but they were not pumped together.

When industrialisation came about suddenly a body existed that was what industrialists needed, everything else was classified as disabled.

Forced out because they could not complete a wrote task for profit.

Design schools have accessibility courses where you learn disability through compliance.

Disability is a creative practice, not compliance.

Disabled people are the original life hackers because they are forced to navigate a world that was designed to exclude them.

Liz started realising there was an easy solution.

It's not just disabled people who aren't able to access the things they need.

If you start making disability studies a part of all design schools when students graduate they won't think they're designing for, they design with

How do we honour the friction of each person's disability?

When disability enters your organisation it's going to be messy.

Liz was telling a story about visiting an accessibility lab which was likely a cleared out closet.

When it comes to disability designers think they just know.

We don't.

Not all things need saving.

Sometimes they just need to exist.

**I in no way did credit to Liz's incredible presentation, it was amazing and exactly what we need to reflect on so we aren't in saviour mode when designing!!

@threadreaderapp unroll please!