Thread by @RohanIrvine

I'm excited for the next speaker, @emkey presenting: 'What about us? Marginalisation, Privilege, Power and Inclusion Today.'

#uxaustralia2020

Mark joins us from the Phillipines today!

Mark works in the technology area, which means he gets access to knowledge and technology that a lot of people won't get access to. He is a cis gendered man which means he can walk into a STEM room and be taken seriously. He comes from a high ranking university.

He has privilege.

He has also been marginalised.

He is South East Asian, Lives with a chronic illness HIV+, and is an atheist in a majority Catholic country. He is proudly homosexual. He has certain gender non-conforming tendencies.

The intersection of these two vectors mean we all experience things differently.

Mark gives the example of his boss in Romania, who's able to take walks in the forest and himself who had to move home.

And we get to work from home, while many don't.

Privilege can lead to dangerous assumptions about the people we design for.

Tech solutions that are mostly created in the west, even when we look at innovations in Asia we think about it with a western lens.

We have a romanticised idea of what Asia is and generally focus on China, Japan & South Korea.

We forget that most of asian is living in post colonial poverty.

Mark has put up a poll: What is the offical language of The Phillipines?

How many local languages are there?

What happens to home schooling in a pandemic if you can't access computers or the internet?

The department of education forced people to go into online learning without giving them any way to access online learning?

Privilege impacts empathy.

Often we have grown so accustomed and comfortable with the privilege we have we forget to look beyond our own comforts.

We tell people to just walk to work, even though they are 3-4km from work or groceries.

Or we force people to download a tracking app to access basic services, when you're part of the 30% of people with no smart phone or internet access.

How can you understand something that you will never experience?

Empathy has become such a cheap word.

We conflate empathy with sympathy and sympathy comes with a power imbalance which is what we need to fix.

When we have conferences in Asia where all the speakers are white.

When we create the designs for #blm who actually benefits?

So how do we truly design for the marginalised?

6 months ago I was convicted with my own thoughts, but I still don't have a real answer today.

'Maybe it's time we replace empathy with trust' — @TatianaTMac

Trust them to be part of your teams and your projects.
Trust them when they tell you their experience.

We need to stop believing that we as the experts are the ones who should be designing solutions.

When we think like that we end up with human zoos.

Asia comes from deeply rooted colonial history.

The people who moderate content to the detriment of their mental health, most of your apps, the people who you talk to when you call your bank are in sweatshops in Manila.

Are you design for them to have a better life? Or are you designing to feel like you gave them a bette life

Maybe it's time you start designing WITH people!

Amazing talk by Mark!!!!! Thank you so much!

It's a matter of being human to people.

Q: Worst examples of Western designers causing harm to SE Asian markets
A: Automatically assuming Filipinos can't speak or read in english, they automatically think you need to translate everything into Filipino or Tagalog it excludes huge amounts of the popualtions.

Q: I have a chronic illness and was scared to share it, what was your turning moment
A: I am very privileged protecting me from discrimination, my mother works for world health. Knowing the laws against discrimination based on chronic illness

I had a lot of friends who supported me, and people who have paved the way for me. Freddy Mercury was a rock star and lived with HIV.

Q: Languages modification code, is it empathy of sympathy?
A: It never occurred to me, colonialism and imperialism and systems of power imbalance meant it was something that never really bothered me. There's a problem when we use the language

Someone who is less human or more human (master/slave). it comes from a horrific background, and it's something we can fix. Once I learned this I went and changed my own code.

Q: How do we make sure we're respectful when we approach people to design with.
A: This is something I have a problem with, one thing we need to realise is that when we approach commuities like this we are not talking over them or we know more than them

Don't assume things should be better or worse. What they need now vs what we think they need. It's a good place to start asking what they need, rather than 'can we do this'. Basic UX things we forget when we start talking to marginalised people

When ever we offer someone help without asking them we already make an assumption that they are less than.

@threadreaderapp unroll please!