A designer of many hats (0m31s)

The speaker opens by introducing themself as a UX and service designer, qualitative researcher, pigeon enthusiast, mezzo-soprano, zine-maker — a person whose connecting thread is real, complicated, interesting problems and the systems-thinking lens that fits them.

"I am someone who kind of has many hats, maybe too many hats, I dunno, we shall see"

"I'm really obsessed with systems — I love understanding and just observing and seeing how people work in reality rather than how they say they work"

"I'm very much like a failed wannabe physicist and then had to kind of get a real job and start paying the bills"

Socio-technical design as our lineage (2m37s)

Albert Cherns' 1976 paper on socio-technical design lays out nine principles — compatibility, minimal critical specification, boundary locations, iterative refinement — that map almost exactly onto modern lean UX, scrum and agile vocabulary. The point is that our field is older than the consultants charging for it.

"the closure of options always opens new ones"

"when consultants come along charging you like a couple of thousands, you can say it's fine — there's a free paper by Albert Cherns from 1976"

"so much of this stuff that was theorised in the seventies, and in fact itself was based on older theories"

When design frameworks get stuck (7m19s)

Ethical and holistic design frameworks tend to produce a wall of post-its and a hollow feeling of what next? The reframing she proposes is exactly the one socio-technical design suggested fifty years ago: new solutions emerge from the simple interactions between actors within the system, so reach for simple tools to make sense of complex problems.

"there seems to be a point where it's easy to get stuck — it's kind of really complex, it's kind of really deep, some of it's kind of emotionally taxing"

"new solutions often emerge from the simple interactions between the actors within the system"

"to address complexity, often what you need are the simplest, easiest steps to take"

Everyone here is a designer (9m26s)

Borrowing Milton Glaser's framing: a designer is someone who moves things from an existing condition to a preferred one. Under that definition, every engineer, researcher and product person in the room is a designer, and the talk is for all of them.

"the definition of a designer is someone who moves things from an existing condition to a preferred one"

"for the purpose of this talk, when I'm saying designer, I really don't mean specifically a UX or a UI designer"

"I was born in the discourse, you merely adopted it"

Design Justice and mapping relationships (10m29s)

Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice framework asks three questions: who are we designing for, who might be harmed, who might materially benefit. From there you sub-divide by demographic or job-to-be-done and draw weighted arrows between groups showing how a benefit to one might be a harm to another.

"you start off thinking about who is it that you're actually making for, who might be harmed, and who might materially benefit"

"I think that bit's also quite important to emphasise — them materially"

"if you're really fancy, you've got all the right research, you might even be able to add different weights to your arrows"

How might we questions and FAB statements (13m01s)

The bridge from the ethical analysis back into your sprint: take each problematic relationship in your map and reframe it as a how might we question, then run a Five Whys to deepen it, then translate it into a Feature → Advantage → Benefit statement that ties the redesign back into the product you actually have to ship.

"we can use tools like the five whys technique to further dig in and create even more on a how-might-we question, sort of more detailed level"

"FAB statements... you can start thinking about it in terms of the feature, the particular thing that someone's interacting with, the advantage that gives them, and then the overall benefit"

"ultimately then one can simply by using these really, really basic techniques... go from actually quite a complicated set of problematics down to things that actually could be really testable"

Values vs actors mapping (15m41s)

A variant: list your team's actual values (not the corporate-mission ones) on one axis, the actors in the system on the other, and walk through what each value means for each actor. Contradictions emerge naturally — and the value-mapping is most useful when it reveals that two teams' KPIs are quietly undermining each other.

"the values that you're working to, your actual values, not the values that one's company might espouse"

"for this particular value, what does it mean for this particular actor in the system? Sometimes it doesn't mean anything, sometimes it means something contradictory"

"you begin to see where maybe your KPIs or metrics aren't quite meshing, maybe one team's goals actually subtly undermine another team's goals"

Card sorting for shared language (18m47s)

When you doubt whether users actually care about threat models or embodied algorithmic racism, the answer is usually yes — they just describe it differently. Card sorting on the same vocabulary you use internally reveals where your terminology meets theirs.

"most people do care and most people are thinking about this stuff — they're just using a different language"

"you can use something like card sorting basically as a way of really understanding the different languages that people use"

"understanding how people think and understand words is just another form of information architecture mapping"

Relationship is the heart of good design (23m03s)

Annika Hansteen-Izora's framing: anyone without a relationship with the community they are designing for simply cannot design for that community. When the tools and frameworks stop helping, the right question is whether you have the relationship — and whether the relationship you have is reparative, nurturing, or just defensive.

"anyone who doesn't have a relationship with the community they are designing for simply can't design for that community"

"are we in relationship with the community that we're serving?"

"is it going to be reparative, is it gonna be nurturing? Is it gonna be serving, is it gonna be one of solidarity?"

Build community, learn lineage, design authentically (26m08s)

Closing thoughts: read the cyberneticians of the 50s, learn from architecture and fashion designers, engage with the Design Justice Network and the Decolonising Design community — and recognise that points of tension are the moments when relationship work matters most.

"we are here because of many impossible problems that were solved"

"there's some really fantastic conversations going on about smart cities and co-design that are happening because whilst there's a wealth that we can learn from other designers, there's definitely no reason we can't keep on exploring how to create our own legacies"

"get out there, build community and accountability, have fun and experiment, and design authentically"