Why isn’t all design inclusive? Season 1 wrap-up, with Scott Berkun

SB 0:00

A company could decide that they want to make notebooks where you can flip them over so you can write left to right or write right to left. That's going to cost them twenty percent more per unit. And they look at the sales that they'll generate. Well, there's only seventeen percent of the world that are left handed. So does it make sense to make this product?

TS 0:20

Welcome to Made For Us and the final episode of season one. If you're a regular listener, thanks for being an early adopter of this podcast. And if you're tuning in for the first time, Episode 22 isn't a bad place to start. And I hope you enjoy discovering the previous 21 episodes. I'd like to thank all my guests for being part of this brand new podcast. Most of them agreed to an interview before the show launched or even had a name. But they were as excited about the idea as I was. Made For Us started as an attempt to find some of the best examples of inclusive design and innovation, and to share the stories of the people and companies behind the products. Over the past few months, I've spoken to founders who've invented clever solutions to an overlooked problem, often one that they'd experienced themselves, and leaders driving inclusive innovation in their companies and industries. One thing that was clear is that there's been huge progress in recent years. Here are a couple of my guests on why they're optimistic. First Athna Wang from Covry, and then Hector Minto from Microsoft.

Speaker 1 1:22

There's been a big push of innovation and kind of stepping out of like the standard box that we've all been accustomed to. And everyone has been trying to find new ways or better ways to do something. And I think this generation especially has been the most vocal about, Just because it's always been done this way doesn't mean that's the right way.

Speaker 2 1:43

What I'm most proud of is where we got people, without having their arm twisted, to go and say, I want to do some inclusion stuff. You know, we want to create cool new inclusive products, and then actually go and tell the market that we're doing it.

TS 1:56

But despite the progress, one question kept coming back to me. Why are inclusive products more of an exception rather than the norm? Why aren't all products designed this way? My guests had similar questions on their minds as well. Here's Ade Hassan and Terri Bryant, the founders of Nubian skin and Guide Beauty.

Speaker 3 2:14

Even if fashion may seem frivolous to some people, why shouldn't I be able to do something I want to, simply because of the colour of my skin?

Speaker 4 2:22

This is not just a kind, nice thing to do. People need to understand that it's also a smart thing to do, and it creates better communities and it creates better products, so why wouldn't we just create through that lens?

TS 2:34

To explore this further, I reached out to Scott Berkun. He's the author of best selling books on innovation and design, including How Design Makes the World, an invitation to explore the world around us through the lens of design. We had a fun discussion about what good design is, and why it's so hard to design well, let alone in an inclusive way. If you enjoy this episode, I hope you'll leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. And of course, do pass it on to a teammate or anyone who'd appreciate a thought provoking conversation. Here's Scott kicking things off.

SB 3:10

My name is Scott Berkun. And I'm the author of a book called How Design Makes the World. And I've been writing books about design and good ideas and innovation for about twenty years. And before that, I worked in tech, I was a user experience designer. And then I spent most of my career as a project manager. So I led teams of engineers and designers trying to make good things.

TS 3:33

Great, thank you. So you went from leading teams of designers and engineers to becoming an author. And you've actually written eight books, including How Design Makes the World. Tell us a little bit more about that journey.

SB 3:46

The journey was precipitated by the fear of never doing more than one thing in terms of my professional life, I felt very lucky to get a job in the tech sector at all. And then I had nine or 10 years where I got to work on important projects. And I had a overall really good experience. And I felt that I learned a lot. And then little by little as I turned about 30 years old, I started to question Is this the only kind of query I'm ever going to have? And if I want to try to do something else, it probably makes sense to do that soon. Because the older I get, the more conservative I'll probably get or maybe I'll have children or who knows what.

So I decided to quit and try to do something new. And the best idea I had for doing something new was to write books. I didn't know that that would work out. I knew I needed to try do something else. And as fortune would have it, I wrote a book about how to be a good project manager. And my first book in Two thousand and five, which was almost twenty years ago. But at the time, I didn't know what would happen and the book did well. And it gave me a following around that subject. So I wrote another book and that book was about the topic of innovation and how do you make better things for the world? And that book did well. And so I just kept going. And I haven't really looked back since. And design has always been a subject that I've cared a lot about. And I finally felt like it was time for me to try to write a book that taught everyone what good design means. And what we can all do to either be better designers or to appreciate good design more in the world. And that's, that's my most recent book.

TS 5:25

And one of the ideas in How Design Makes the World is that everything around us is designed, some things more thoughtfully than others. Can you talk a bit more about why you think a book like this was needed?

SB 5:37

Well, I think anyone who complains about anything in the world would agree that...everyone who drives in traffic and is like, why is it so terrible? Why does it take me an hour to go 10 minutes, or someone who takes public transportation and they're frustrated because the bus is late, or someone who tries to, now it's tax season and someone tries to fill out the tax forms themselves, and they find it so frustrating and confusing. I think everyone who complains believes that there should be a better way that things are. And I did not feel like the popular books that exists for a general audience for design do a very good job of explaining why the world is the way that it is. So you have books like Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things, which is an excellent book, you have Steve Krug's book, Don't Make Me Think, also excellent. But neither one does a good job of explaining why things are the way they are. And then also how to be smarter and more design aware and thinking about the process by which things become better, I thought I could do a better job of explaining the business reasons, the cultural reasons, and to give everyone an appreciation for how everything in their daily lives was created, for better or for worse by people who are trying to do good, even if the end result is disappointing. So that was the motivation for the book.

TS 7:01

And it's a really fun book. And I think it makes design accessible for people who aren't designers, and also sort of challenges people to notice the world around them. And you raise an interesting question about what exactly is good versus bad design. And you have some great examples throughout the book to help people think about this question. From the design of the Segway and the Jacuzzi to casinos, even instruments of torture. What can we learn from some of these examples?

SB 7:29

It's funny to be on your podcast, which I know it's about inclusion and to talk about torture devices at all, I think I've just I've earned special points, maybe for bringing up torture devices. I think that good design is...when people complain, they are assuming that their particular needs or their particular situation is the only one that matters. And that's normal to do. And to think more deeply or more thoughtfully about design, you have to understand what it is to be that person who has to make these decisions, that it's difficult to try to satisfy 10 different people who all have different preferences for what they like. If you were a restaurant, and you only have one menu item, and you had to decide of all the people and you were let's say you were an ice cream store, but you only have one flavour. Some people prefer chocolate, some people prefer vanilla. But if you had to only pick one. You have to realise as a decision maker, there are some people who you're going to disappoint.

And that's one of the first levels of understanding good design in general, is that it's actually really difficult to design things well because of how many different opinions and preferences there are. So good design then in part means someone has to think very carefully about who they're designing for. Because the more you're trying to design for every scenario, every person, every situation, you have so many constraints that make it hard to satisfy anybody well. And so many of the examples that come up in the book are different explorations as to why these things ended up the way that they are. And to try to give the reader a better sense for evaluating whether something is good or not. A traffic is a fun example everyone complains about traffic. But part of the thing you have to learn about traffic is that you as the person driving in traffic are part of traffic, you are helping create the problem that you are annoyed by by choosing to drive your your traffic for all the people who are behind you. And once you start thinking about it that way, good design for public transportation becomes a lot more complicated. And so good design is something that is very subjective. It depends on the goals or the priorities for whoever is doing the design work. And usually it means that there's some either some person, some preference, or some scenario, some situation that you can't design for well, if you're going to design something well for other situations.

TS: 10:02

So you have a set of questions that you think are a good starting point for anyone who wants to achieve good design?

SB: 10:10

Yes, there's lots of different lists of questions that people can refer to and use. The ones that I like to use just help anchor who you're designing for, what problem you're trying to solve, what problem you're not trying to solve, and what unintended consequences may come about, because of the thing that you do. When Ford and General Motors created the car, there weren't that many cars on the road, they didn't have to anticipate the problem that we have now of mass pollution and congestion on our roads, because it wasn't something they would consider. But part of the responsibility of designing well, is to think through the unintended consequences of the thing that you make, what happens if it becomes really popular? What new problems will that create? And those problems might end up being worse than the problem that you tried to solve. And that's part of the responsibility that we have as engineers and designers, and entrepreneurs about the wider world that we're all designing and creating in.

TS: 11:14

And I thought it was interesting that you argue that words like intuitive and user friendly are actually a bit misguided. Why is that?

SB: 11:24

Well, I think in every profession, there are certain terms that are fun to say, and become popularised. But then they reach a point where they're just, they're just meaningless. And the word intuitive and user friendly are probably the best known ones from the design and user experience world. And so it's something you'll see in advertising or in marketing, oh, it's the most user friendly trash compactor or garbage disposal. But that's not a term that anyone can test. It's not like a sort of certificate you get from the User Friendliness Society of America. Intuitive really just means that it's familiar to you. So the classic example is when on the Macintosh, they had file folders, and you could put documents inside file folders. That whole metaphor was successful for all the people who worked in offices, who had manila folders, and had printed documents that they could put in the physical world, they put into folders. So they went to the computer, it would seem intuitive, because they were already familiar with those metaphors. The problem is, if you're not familiar with those metaphors, the same exact Macintosh desktop is not intuitive. Because you don't know, you're not familiar with these things.

And the word intuitive has bias inherent in it, because it assumes that the metaphors that are chosen, if you get it right for one person, it'll be intuitive for everybody. And that's definitely clearly not true. And so intuitive means for one set of people who are familiar with this, these concepts, it will be familiar to them and therefore be easier to use. But for people who are unfamiliar with those concepts, it may be harder than had you chosen something else. And it comes back around to the same set of questions of who are you designing for? What can you assume that they know? You know, what can you assume that they don't know? And what ideas can you come up with that will be the best possible combination of chances for success for all the people who will use what you make? And when you think about it that way, it's a much more challenging problem. But at least we're being honest about what success looks like, and why it happens.

TS: 13:46

I'm so glad I didn't call my podcast Intuitive because that was one of the names I was actually considering.

SB: 13:51

Well, you know what, though, but it's part of, part of what it is, though this is a different. This is a different thread of conversation of there's marketing around what makes people feel like something is well designed, or recognisable. And the word intuitive is a very popular word that could be a very, very successful name for a podcast. But it may not be anchored in the best argument for people who are inside practitioners about how we make more well designed things in the world. And I think part of the challenge of any profession is marketing and things that get attention including terms like user friendly, despite the problems that it has. It has value that if you market something based on its user friendliness, it does convey a kind of prioritisation that customers think you're going to have thought through. So I wouldn't have been upset to have been invited on your Intuitive podcast show. I would have joined anyway.

TS: 14:51

Right. Okay, great. And so this is a good time to talk about the question that we're trying to answer in this episode. And also, the question that underlies this whole podcast, which is why isn't all design inclusive? You know, I've always wondered like, why wouldn't companies want to develop products that benefit the greatest number of people? And why is inclusion often seen as an optional extra? If it's thought about at all? So I know it's a big question, but I'm sure you have some answers.

SB: 15:22

I do. I'm happy to offer my opinion. The first thing I think about for questions like this is about the general competence of any organisation. Important questions like this, Why aren't more things built in an inclusive way? Why don't we live in a more equitable society? Why aren't we smarter about the environment? All these big questions that I care about, and I think are important. My first thought, though, from all my experience as a, as a project leader person, is that in general, most organisations are dysfunctional, like they don't do a bunch of basic things well. There's a classic book from many years ago called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And the book outlines these five patterns that are very common in the working world that explain why teams don't work. I'm not a huge fan of the book, the book is a little it's like a fictional scenarios and stuff. But the general idea of the book, I think, is fantastic of Wait a second, like we're assuming that all these organisations are actually good at making decisions and prioritising and being efficient and making good project decisions. And I'm like, no, like, they're not that competent.

And so the ability for most organisations to do anything Well, I think is a lot lower than we assume, when we're asking these big questions. So if an organisation, let's say we have a fictional, let's say we have an average software company in the world. And they make average products, they make average revenue. Their products in general are not that good. They're not terrible, but they're not that good for anybody. And so the idea of some higher bar of say, making a beautiful product, or making a product that people love, or make a product that's inclusive is so far out of their capacity as an organisation, that it's not about some philosophical problem. It's just a functional one. Most organisations don't function very well. So with that lens, the answer to a question like this becomes maybe a little bit simpler, might be more depressing. But it's a little bit it's a little bit, it's a little bit simpler, and that most organisations are struggling just to do what they're currently doing, given their leadership issues and their cultural issues. So to expect them to do a higher quality work has more fundamental problems in the question of inclusion, or the question of beauty or the question of the environment, that's where my brain goes to first is just a company has to be more, an organisation has to be more competent at project management, prioritisation, all these basic things, managing morale, before you can do these more challenging kinds of aspirations.

TS: 18:14

That's an interesting way to think about issue and probably wouldn't have been one that I had thought of. But I think it's a good one. And I know that you've written about organisational design and the fact that organisations are led by people who often don't know that much about design, but it's the leaders of organisations that can have the biggest impact on whether good design is possible.

SB: 18:36

Yeah. But I have another thought too, which is about the nature of capitalism, and the nature of profit seeking organisations, that if an organisation sees a way to use a more inclusive product as a way to gain market share, or to grow its business, then it probably will. So the classic example that comes up in design circles is OXO Good Grips, they make kitchen appliances, and like peelers and different like knives, and they have an origin story that's based in a certain kind of inclusion. But they found that they could make products that would be marketable to everybody by making them easier to use based on inclusive properties.

And I think there are examples where a company will go out of its way, if it lines up directly with profit motive and the costs of doing that product or making it so that it's, the product supports a more diverse set of people. They'll do it, but sometimes it's not in their profit interest. Sometimes it will add more costs, then it will generate revenue. And it becomes a more difficult conversation then for a profit seeking organisation to say, yes, we could make it so our knives are can be used by, by the way I'm left handed. So whenever I think of inclusion, it's just the obvious one for me, there's only 17% of the world's adults are left handed. I'm one of them. And so it's a minor inconvenience to me. But I'm reminded of my, I don't know what you want to call it, my handedness diversity regularly. A company could decide that they want to make notebooks where you can flip them over. So you can write left to right or write right to left, that's going to cost them twenty percent more per unit. And they look at the sales that they'll generate. Well, there's only seventeen percent of the world that are left handed. So does it make sense to make this product? And someone on a spreadsheet will go, No, it doesn't. Because the amount of profit we'll generate from doing this more inclusive version just isn't there. And if you're in that boardroom meeting, and the charter for your company is purely about profit, that's an easy decision, you don't do it.

TS: 20:48

So this comes back to the idea of negative externalities, which you do raise in the book, you know, a company's profits can sometimes come at the expense of consumers of the environment. And so I guess, designs that exclude fall into this category, you know, some consumers will get shut out of using a product. But for some companies, that's the cost that a small group of people have to pay.

SB: 21:08

Yeah, I think that's, that's part of it. So it's not even about the quality of the idea, or the need for the need has to be high enough for a profit motivated company, to value that project, as opposed to other projects. And that conflicts with how that organisation is designed to function, which is depressing. But we have to accept the fact that that's how these corporations are constructed.

TS: 21:36

And I mean, if I was to think about the question, I would maybe have said, well, inclusive design is a movement that's ahead of its time. And in a few years' time, it'll be obvious, but we're not quite there yet. You had an example about the car industry and safety standards. You talked about how inventions like the three point seatbelt and airbags were initially resisted, because they were too expensive. But of course, they're obvious today. So do you think it's a matter of time, or, you know, are there other ingredients that are required for mass adoption of an idea?

SB: 22:07

I wish I felt like it was a matter of time, I feel like the safety example, if I remember correctly, Volvo gets a lot of credit for pushing for the seatbelt, because they thought it was the right thing to do. And then little by little though, they discovered there was a marketing advantage to saying we make safe cars, and they eventually transformed the industry. And then everyone else realised, oh, that's how you sell more cars, you make them safer. But they kind of stumbled upon it, they didn't necessarily see it as the way. One obvious thing, which we haven't mentioned yet, and I'm thinking of diversity of who is in the room making these decisions. And I only touched on it in the book, but just about even something as simple as gender diversity in the room of decision makers. So much of the training data for car accidents is done with test dummies, they used to be done with test dummies that were all built on the male body. And obviously, there's major differences in anatomy between men and women. And had there been two or three women instead of a roomful of just men, that whole conversation, without any extra data, would have been a very different conversation and that on its own, just naturally would have led to a more inclusive path for how cars were designed.

And so I'm a big believer in just, you obviously want whatever kind of diversity you can get into the rooms where decisions are made. And then you naturally absorb the life experience of all those different people in the room. And why wouldn't you want? That seems like the most effective way possible, to accelerate good ideas. So I'm a big believer in, if you told me that I had the power to make one change, you know, across the landscape of these rooms where people are making product and design decisions for making better products, I'd say diversify in every dimension. And then those conversations now incorporate all sorts of different perspectives. And even better, they're now having the conversations between those perspectives to sort out what is most valuable for the goals we have? And that seems like an obvious, obvious way forward. How do you achieve that is difficult. And I'm not an expert in that. But in terms of the ambition for that, it makes complete sense to me.

TS: 24:31

And one thing that I have noticed in the interviews for the podcast over the past few months is that so many of the companies were founded by people who had zero experience in the industry. So it's almost like you need to be an outsider to notice the problem in the first place or to have the urgency to do something about it.

SB: 24:48

It's kind of a mixed bag. And this is true for all the history of innovation and progress, that it can't help sometimes to have an outsider who doesn't have the same assumptions as everyone else, because they'll ask fundamental questions that other people are afraid to ask. And in asking those fundamental questions, they'll come at the problem in a different way, or invite different people in, and you can make something new happen, or something better happen, in part because of your lack of history with that subject or that profession. There's definitely some truth to that. On the other hand, there's often reasons why certain problems haven't been solved. There's often fundamental reasons why we don't have flying cars, or why we don't have teleportation systems or not knowing enough about those fundamental reasons can send you on the same path that other people already know is a dead end. So there is definitely sometimes an advantage to having outsiders involved, for sure.

But sometimes that's also a limitation. There's no simple way to make progress happen. It's more complicated than that one variable or not. Often, again, it's a diversity thing of, if you could form a team with a mixture of people, a founder, maybe who has a personal interest in the problem, but not a background in that space. But to partner with someone who's an engineer with history in it, and get them in a room together. And let that debate and that question and answer and challenging and responding. That kind of teaming up makes a lot of sense, then you're getting the best of both worlds, you're getting the fresh perspective of someone who's an outsider and the iconoclast's ability to challenge assumptions that people have not challenged in a while. But pair that with some insider knowledge, so you don't make, you can avoid obvious mistakes.

TS: 26:46

Yeah, that's great advice. And there's also the idea of solving for one which you write about. And I would say a lot of my guests, they were trying to solve a problem for themselves or for someone in their family. And you wrote that, you know, if you can't solve a problem for one, you're unlikely to be able to solve for millions.

SB: 27:04

Yeah, despite how often people try. It's a classic thing in the tech startup community, of having these pitch ideas. And these business plans for ideas that it's not clear anybody needs or wants, that they sound good, and conceptually, are interesting. But they haven't yet had one person who achieved their goal with the idea yet. Yet, they want to raise millions of dollars. It's just a funny thing. That so often, we are in a rush to make some grand, amazing, you know, billion dollar plan. But we haven't yet built the thing that helps five people with whatever their problem is. It's just a silly kind of hubris, I guess.

TS: 27:52

One thing I wanted to talk about was, you know, the ROI of inclusivity. So there are companies that do want to be responsible, but it also has to make business sense. And measuring the return on investment of inclusivity can be a challenge. How can you make the case for it beyond, this as a good thing to do?

SB: 28:10

I think that there's, an ROI suggests that you, you want some kind of metric, or spreadsheet, I don't know that I can give you that off the top of my head, but I can make an argument for, I think I tried to make the argument in the book, that when you're at the point when you've identified a problem, and you're trying to solve it, and you're in the process now of trying to either understand the problem better, or you're starting to think of possible solutions, that there's a lot of merit to the argument that by solving a problem for a wider group of people, sometimes you solve it better for everybody. And so the example from the book is curb cuts. And in America, this is amazing story about how, curb cuts are these little cutouts on the sidewalk. So when you're at an intersection, if you're in a wheelchair, that there's now a sloped curb, so you don't have to jump down from the curb, there's actually a little slope that your wheelchair could go down to get you into the street, and then you go up the curb cut on the opposite side.

It's a great example of in trying to solve this problem for wheelchairs, it's basically it's solving a problem of how do you help as many citizens as possible, move around through the urban landscape? That it turned out that by doing this, it actually solves a lot of other people's problems, too, that if you were a UPS delivery person, and you have a dolly with a bunch of heavy things on it, you can now use the curb cut. So for a whole bunch of service workers now, this thing that at first might have just seemed like we're making life easier for people with a disability. We're actually making life better for people without disabilities too. Then you think through of people on bicycles or people on your skateboard. And suddenly, if you're able to look at the problem in a wider way. It's not just some quote unquote inclusivity thing. You're actually improving the quality of life and simplifying the user experience of the city for lots and lots of other people. And that doesn't cost a lot of effort to do that kind of thinking. When you're already in a design process, you're already working on a project, but you're early in the process. So that, to me, is the best return on investment argument possible that if you just ask a few questions, just a few questions, early on in the brainstorming process for a project, you give yourself, the company and the world the possibility of benefiting from the same amount of effort, but 2x, 3x more people will benefit from it. That's a profit win and a world win all at once, just by thinking more included inclusively. And again, it comes back to if the people in the room are diverse. Those conversations will happen anyway. So I think that's my best argument for ROI of inclusivity that when you do it right, not always, but when you're doing the work, right, you find ways that you are widening the benefit. It's not just for some isolated case.

Transcribed with the help of otter.ai