You might be feeling like the world is a dystopia, and there are real choices made every day around us that led us here. This talk will take a closer look at human centred design, the ways in which it's broken, and what the world needs from us for a better future.
Putting individuals at the core of what we measure can be bad for products and bad for business. Here are some ideas of what you can do instead to drive great products that are better for the world and make considered choices.
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Hello, everyone. Brian here from TuringFest, and welcome back to week seven. We're to the final stretch, I guess, of our eight week event. But a quick before we kick into today's action, a quick recap on what we talked about last week in case you missed it.
As always, it's all available on the on the web platform. So we've we had Yada Paoli talking about structuring your teams for growth, and April Dunford on positioning your product in the mind of your customer. Amy Zima from Spotify walked us through the importance of product strategy.
And then we Andre Vinitsky and I had a chat on last Thursday about the lessons he's learned on his startup journey so far with graphy. And we've also added a jobs tab that you may have seen in the event app. So for anyone looking for the next opportunity, there's tons of jobs in there from partners of ours that are hiring Amazon current health, delivery administrate lots of others.
So feel free to check that out. So this week, we're looking at ethics in technology, products, practices, businesses, and start at the end of today's session, we've got at five thirty, which is a little later than than our usual sessions, we've got an digital one of our partners hosting a session on the data ethics of finance.
And that is they're talking about how the shift to people owning their own their own data and what that means for the finance industry. So and digital are hosting it, but it is, you can access it through the truing fast platform that kicks off at five thirty.
And feel free to register for that ahead of time. Okay, so the core programme for today, we have at four o'clock, UK time, we'll have Nick Francis, who's CEO and founder at help scout. He's going to be talking about a new way to build businesses.
And a new way to look at business, I guess. We've Katie Martell, renowned marketing consultant. She's kicking it off at three o'clock with chat about marketing in the current age and to watch out for woke washing. But up next, we have Eli Montgomery, who's head of UX at the UK's latest unicorn, Kazoo.
And he's talking us through how we move beyond human centered design. So over to you, like. Good morning, everyone. My name is Eli Montgomery. I'm the head of user experience at Kizu, and I'm super excited to be sharing with Turing Quest this year.
My talk today is called beyond human centered design, Unfucking the World by Using a Bigger Lens. So here's a couple things about me. I'm Intention on Twitter. There will be a resource guide to this talk on Notion, and you can get there by using that short link.
So we are in twenty twenty. We're nearing the end of twenty twenty, but it's been a very, very tough year for lots and lots of people. The fact that we're doing this conference remotely is a testament to, you know, the state of the world and how it's changed, and it's nearly the end of the year.
I first came up with this talk kind of thinking about black mirrors and product ethics, and so I wanted to just start with a moment of just reflection on all the things that tech has done for us, both good and bad. It's brought us together and enabled us to have this conference today.
And, also, it's done some not so great things in the past decade and more, and we have to talk about those too. So let's take a look at human centered design. So human centered design is the idea that we should design for a single person or have, like, a single core user in mind.
And one of the tools that we use to do this is a proto persona. This person is called Mary. She has a house cleaner, buys takeaway three nights a week, and is a working mom, apparently, is married with two kids and makes quite a decent bit of money.
But what we don't know about Mary is what her community is, what her environment is like, what the bounds of Mary's world are, and how Mary impacts her society, her local social scene, the ecology of where she lives, and other things. And I think if we're going to build products that are great for the world and great for business, we have to start thinking in ecology terms.
We have to move beyond human centered design. You know, and the thing is is human centered design is not something that's necessarily new. It's something that we've actually been doing for quite some time, but we'll get to that in just a second. So human centered design was kind of built on these principles.
Right? So the idea that we should start with things that are usable and then work our way up to meaningful, right? And then delight, which we hear a lot about when we talk about design is like near the top. And I think that sometimes we overlook that when we design products this way, we can actually end up being really self centered as a species and forcing people into self centered behaviors.
You know, usable products can make us thought thoughtless. Wasteful products or useful products can make us wasteful. Desirable products can be addictive. Delightful products can be frivolous, and meaningful products can make us self centered. When we eliminate some of the barriers to responsibility for users, we're also eliminating the things that make, you know, social connections really rich and good and powerful in human community.
So I'd like us to keep this in mind as we talk about what moving beyond human centered design might look like today. I really love this quote by Mike Montero because I think it's you know, it puts responsibility where it should be, which is with us, you know, the designers, the product managers, the tech people who have really designed the last decade of, you know, innovation and social connection and communication across the Internet and in our pockets with our phones and everything else.
You know, the world isn't broken. It's working exactly as it was designed to work, and we're the ones who designed it. You know, human centered design from the automobile to the ride hailing app to the delivery app to the airplane has fundamentally reshaped the world that we live in.
You know, you look at cities and the way cities have exploded over the last two, three hundred years compared to human history. And we're just in a very different space. I'd say that we're in a human centered world, and there are downsides to that that we have to pay attention to and take account of.
You know, we're in a place where the systems that we've designed are now designing us, and we're in a place where the world that we live in is shaped as much by things that are in our control as things that have started to spiral out of our control.
You know, we look at things like airlines, which are burning thousands of gallons of fuel flying ghost planes, you know, and perhaps the travel statistics have changed with people, you know, not necessarily taking the virus as seriously as they were in March, but, you know, these ghost planes are burning thousands of gallons of fuel and not really doing anything for anyone other than fulfilling some arbitrary requirement.
And the system was designed that way to ensure probably reliability, but it's coming at the expense of other things. And there's always trade offs that we might not be aware of when we're designing products, and we should start to take awareness of those things.
And I'm going to give you some tools for how to do that today. You know, and here's another example of the way the world being designed, you know, the way the world was designed being the way it works. The richest among us have gotten richer since the pandemic started, and the poor have stayed poorer.
People have, you know, massive unemployment while Wall Street continues to climb up. You know, the Dow just hit thirty thousand the other day. And that's a first in history. While, you know, there are massive unemployment statistics all over the world, not just the US.
You know, and here's the thing. Back in two thousand eleven, Marc Andreessen wrote that software is eating the world. And that was really prescient. But, you know, speaking to all of you today, we're in a place where software is the world. You know, think about what we're doing now.
You're on the web at a computer. You probably have a smartphone next to you. Everything from, you know, your alarm clock sometimes to your phone to your doorbell to your vacuum cleaner is probably powered by software. And that's a very different place than we were even just a decade ago.
And so we have to start to recognize that even though software is the world and, you know, there's benefits that come with that, there's also downsides. You know, ten of the largest tech companies or ten of the larger of the top ten companies, seven of them are tech companies.
So you look at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, aka Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba, you know, those are all technology companies, and they're, you know, seven of the ten biggest in the entire world. And so we've really upended the way that company structures happen and the way our economy moves forward, but that has some downsides and we have to take stock of those too.
You know? When you think about social behaviors and designing for an individual, you know, this is a quote from the book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and the average adult checks their phone thirty times a day. The average millennial checks their phone more than a hundred and fifty seven times a day.
Now I'm not sure what Facebook's North American director of marketing meant by millennial because, you know, some millennials are approaching their mid forties now. But, you know, that's not necessarily something to be enthusiastic about. Useful products, you know, and apps with frequent updates can be addictive, and we live in an age where those addictions are being monetized.
So how do we begin to move beyond human centered design? You know, if we're designing for just the individual, what is that doing for our economy? What is it doing for our, you know, our product thinking? What's it doing for the way that we build products?
Well, I like to draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources, and this is Dan Barber. Dan is a farm to table chef, and you can watch an episode about him and Blue Hill Farms on Netflix's Chef's Table. And what I like about Dan is he has a very good and sound approach to ecology thinking.
As a farm to table chef, he's worked to design a farm that's sustainable, that operates year round, and that provides seasonal food direct from the farm to the restaurant. And in the same way, digital product people should be thinking in these ways about the data they collect, how they use it, the customers themselves, their scenes and situations, and how, you know, individual unit economics are not enough to understand the way that we should be thinking about our products in society.
So here are some actions that we're gonna talk about for moving beyond human centered product thinking. I want us to take a look at how to uncover systems and impacts, reframe where you measure value, focus on what you can control, and then take regenerative action.
So action one, let's talk about uncovering systems and impacts. I think the most important thing to remember is that we can no longer measure product success at the individual level. You know, Dan, our friend could be in a place where he decides to measure, you know, number of plates sold as his only measure of success, and he'd be in a place where he's not necessarily caring for the economy and his farm and his customers in the same way.
And what happens when you optimize for the individual level? Let's take a look at Uber. Well, the statistics show that more Uber drivers on the road does not actually reduce the carbon footprint of cities, you know, which was the big pitch from Uber and Lyft when they first got started was that they would take cars off the road.
What cities have found is that there's actually more cars on the road, and in some places, the carbon footprint has gone up by as much as sixty nine percent. And, you know, Uber is optimizing for you, for your ride, for your convenience, right, for the ways in which you need to get around the city, and there's nothing wrong with this.
But, you know, at the same time, when you think about other forms of transportation like public transit, they are greener, more reliable in some ways. And they also, you know, are more equitable for things beyond just one individual user's needs. And I think the next decade of product thinking requires us to think in ecologies.
And it's not just Uber, right, you know, when we look at the way that societies are shaped and the way products are shaped. You know, the more something is shaped for an individual, the less likely it's appropriate for others. And when we start to include the environment and our grandchildren's grandchildren, we find that, you know, the things that we're designing for ourselves are coming at the expense of future generations.
Here's another one that's pretty fun where measuring unit economics doesn't actually move things forward for everyone else. Right? So if you were to send no thank you emails. Right, thank you emails are a thing that are very common in Britain, and there's actually a whole campaign called Think Before You Thank, the one or two word, like, thank you emails or got it, you know, cheers, I appreciate that, those emails, if all of those in Britain were to disappear, this is a study by OVO Energy, that would be worth eighty one thousand flights from London to
Madrid. And that's a pretty big and significant number. And again, because email is really easy to send and the carbon footprint of it is kind of invisible, it's just in a data center somewhere, people don't really think, but it actually takes a lot of power to send email, store email, you know, for people to receive those emails and read them and, you know, reply, oh, yeah, okay, you're welcome.
You know, that's a lot of waste that we're injecting into the system. So we could be encouraging people to be more mindful or to be more concise or to send fewer, more direct emails that say everything they need to say to reduce the carbon footprint and to have a better impact on society.
You know? And the thing is is, like, this is kind of the byproduct or the artifact of human centered design. Right? We have built a world in which we are kind of thoughtless about some of the things that we're doing, and it ends up hurting people, it ends up hurting the environment.
You know, in twenty twenty, COVID masks are part of the litter that now line the streets and this is something that, you know, maybe you haven't done but it still has an impact on us all And it's something that we need to be mindful of.
You know, human centered design still happens in systems, and I think that one of the detractors is that we've been in a place where we have let human centered design illuminate or obscure the systems that we look to and the systems that we try to understand and the context in which society happens and products exist.
So we have to get back to that. So let's, you know, take step two and reframe where we measure value. How might we change the way that we measure value and start to understand the impact of our product in the world? You know, and here's the thing, this isn't just a moral crisis.
It's not just about littering or, you know, oh, save the trees or save the whales. It's also bad business. There's this really great article on Substack, and there will be a link in my slides, which you can find on Notion, about pizza arbitrage.
And the story is that this guy found out that DoorDash was selling his pizzas for a third less than it cost him to sell them himself. And they were basically trying to move in and, you know, muscle him out of direct sales by undercutting his prices.
And he found that if he ordered pizzas from himself, he was actually making, like, three bucks more of pizza by having DoorDash basically subsidize those pizzas for him. And DoorDash in its, you know, desire to generate value for itself and for its shareholders was undercutting a small business owner and pushing customers to, you know, order pizzas through them, but at the expense of this small business and what he could do with his own effort.
And it just ended up being really bad for everyone involved. And, you know, this is one of the most brilliant pieces of economic writing in the last, I don't know, decade. And it's really, really good. So read it, check it out. It's a really, really good story about how the unit economics and the way that we're investing venture capital these days just isn't working for the products that we need to build.
You know, and when you look at the numbers, DoorDash in all of twenty nineteen lost so much money, you know, they they brought in nine hundred million and lost four hundred and fifty. Grubhub brought in three hundred and sixty million and lost thirty three.
And Uber Eats, you know, lost one point two billion dollars to make seven hundred and thirty four million. And once upon a time, you know, the economics of these companies would be completely unsustainable, and we would be in a place where we go, yeah, that's not really a company, that's just, you know, a slush fund, if you will, that's kind of muscling its way into trying to create something, you know, and I think that these kinds of companies are in a place where they're, you know, experiencing the if you build it, they will come.
And yeah, people have showed up, but that doesn't mean that you have a sustainable business. It doesn't mean that you've got the right economics, and it doesn't mean that you've got the right sense of value, you know, and here's the thing. These delivery drivers are not being paid what they should be.
You know, it was in the news the other day that one of the companies whose name I can't remember now basically stole tips directly from their employees where people were tipping in their app. They stole those tips and reappropriated them for other things, and they paid a settlement fine of, like, two point five million dollars, which is quite a bit, but is not, you know, significant enough to maybe change the way that these businesses operate.
And if we wanna be fair and equitable to people and have sustainable businesses and have sustainable, you know, life for everyone. We're gonna have to change the way that we think about value. It's not just providing the cheapest food to the customer at their, you know, desired time.
It's making sure that people are compensated well and that we can move the entire economy forward, not just the shareholders, not just the individuals who are profiting most off it. So there's a couple things that I want to provide you that should help you with understanding the ecological impact of your work.
Service blueprinting and journey mapping are two great ways in which you can really understand how your customer and their world start to fit together, and I'd encourage you to dig into those and look them up. There's a couple of resources in my talk guide, so I won't cover them too much in-depth.
There's also this system ecology tool called a rich picture method and service ecology, And these are really great for starting to understand external factors and how they impact your customers and their world. You know? I think as we start to think about the future, we need to focus on what we can control.
The circle of control is things that you can, you know, have a direct influence over, how information flows between people in your system, what information is shown to who and how it's shown, who can manipulate, control, and measure information in the system, what you measure, why it's important what you measure, why it's important.
The circle of influence is things that you can, you know, negotiate with your leadership and with your company. So things like external impacts, incentives, and measurements, how people learn about secondary impacts. So if you have a carbon footprint as part of your product, like, start to highlight that and make sure that it's accessible and start advocating for an action plan to reduce that carbon footprint.
And then circle of concern is things that you might concern yourself with but won't necessarily change just through one person. It's gonna take, you know, a team or more, right? So tackling impact at the industry level, advocating for policy changes and working on structural and societal issues.
And finally, step four, take regenerative action. If you just boil the right amount of tea for your tea kettle, you know, if you're making a single cup and you use the water exactly for a single cup, that could power all the streetlights in Britain.
The energy saved by just people using the right amount of water to heat their tea would be all the street lights in the UK for a whole evening. And that's the power of design. Right? And so what does that have to do with you, the product people in the audience tonight?
Well, you can design for that. You can design a single cup boiler that helps customers, you know, make the right decisions about how much water they need. You can design your products with the right anti addictive measures in mind, with the right privacy stakes in mind so that people can have a better future, you know, and as we start to think about the interfaces and the interactions, you know, let's expand the lens and unfuck the world.
Let's look at the journey, the structure, the system, and the ecosystem because all of it's important. And I'd say that, you know, if the last decade of product has pushed us to a place where, you know, we were looking at usable, useful, and delightful, let's start with a base that's responsible and work our way up from there towards equitable, empowering, sustainable, and then ultimately regenerative products.
Thanks so much. Bye. All right. A lot to a lot to think about there in Eli's talk, a lot to dig into. So we're gonna go we're lucky enough to have Eli with us. So we're gonna go and have a chat and see hear more hear more from Eli.
So hello, are you there? Hey, thanks for having me. Sure. No problem. Thanks. Thanks for giving us that cracking talk. Lots to think about lots to get into. There's a kind of a kind of a depressing thought, I suppose, that's in there near the start that the world is exactly the way we designed it.
And that and we with this, we we address this a little bit actually at TuringFest last year, Christmas scene, I spoke about this with talking about social media platforms. But the concept, what do you think are the consequences of the world working exactly as we designed it?
How aware do you think first of all, in the tech industry are of that? And how much are people addressing it? Well, to be very blunt, I think given the way that people in the tech industry treat racism, I don't think that people are particularly interested even if they're aware.
And it's my hope that we can do better in the next decade by not just being aware, but actually taking responsibility, you know, and that's partially going to be on us. Regulation can only get us so far, you know, investing in being better for ourselves and for our communities is really part and parcel of what it means to improve.
And so when we think about the world is exactly as we've designed it, I think that there's an element of hope in that because if we've designed it this way, we can design it a different way. But it also means that maybe we have to change the things that we value to get there.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of introspection and evaluation, I think going on in the world right now. And even even small things like, you know, most of us are at home, and most of us haven't been on a plane or in a hotel or any of those kinds of things in months.
So, yeah, maybe we have a bit more time to to think and think about what we value. When you and I first spoke about this chat and doing this chat, this this presentation rather, think that was back in It was either December January.
Yeah, I think it was in January, mind the product meetup in London. And you said to me, you're like, Oh, yeah, I'd really like to talk about ecology in, in product design and product thinking. I think that was the first time anyone had put those two things together in sentence with me.
And I mean, obviously, there's a as your talk is brought out, there's a huge a huge element to think about there. And it's kind of nuts that we haven't been thinking about it up to now. But do you see do you in conversations that you have with other product people?
Is ecology something that gets mentioned? Are people thinking about this and the way that you are? That's a good question. I don't quite know, honestly. I think it's starting to emerge, but I think we're still using kind of, like, systems thinking, if you will, to to sort of unpack some of the concepts here, which is great because ecology is a kind of systems thinking.
But I think we still tend to kind of stop at, okay. This is my user or, you know, maybe I shouldn't, like, design for a customer to be addicted, which is a really good start. But, like, what is that addictions, say, carbon footprint or impact on the environment or impact on society at large?
Right? And we've built an information and attention economy, and I think fundamentally, need a different sense of economics and a different sense of value if we're going to build a better future. And so, you know, we do need to think in ecological terms, just about, you know, nature and the oceans, but human ecology and, like, society at large.
And, like, you know, if we had a smart city, quote unquote, which is something that people have been talking about for the better part of a decade and a half, what would that mean? You know, how much more power needs to go into that?
You know, how much more energy needs to power permanent Wi Fi, how much more energy needs to power more cars, you know, and all these other things that, you know, those are products. Right? And those are you know, a city is a kind of product.
It's a product at a very large scale, but it's a kind of product. And in the same way, like, if we are designing digital products that take advantage of the structure of society, what are we putting into the world? You know? Is it bigger carbon footprints, or is it, you know, self affirmation?
Is it good things for individuals as well as society as a whole? And I think, you know, if in the last decade, we focused on personalization at the expense of everything else, I think in the next decade, we need to find those healthy balances between personalization and convenience and, you know, overall positive societal impact.
It's, when you were talking about personalization, but in your talk, you gave the email example, the thank you emails, which I am guilty of sending, I think two of those this morning. And you talked about the carbon footprint of email. And I gotta be honest with you, and I I never think about the carbon footprint of email.
And the eighty one thousand London to Madrid flights that that you mentioned that those those thank you is just out of the UK alone add up to that that kind of blew my mind. So is it do you think it's a common thing that digital waste and the carbon footprint of digital products is, you know, out of mind, out of sight out of mind, nobody thinks about it?
How do you think so? How do you how do you think about it at kazoo? For example, how do you design around that? Yeah, full disclosure, I sell used cars online. You know, there's no getting around the the implications of selling cars, right?
Like, you know, and not to be hypocritical here, like, the carbon footprint is something that we are considering. Right? As we start to have conversations about our product strategy and what it means, you know, my goal is to raise those questions and to make sure that we're thinking about how we build a great society and a great product that also helps people connect with cars if they need them and, you know, maybe find other alternatives if they don't.
Right? And I can't make those decisions by myself, but it's certainly my responsibility to, as a product thinker in this organization, push us to have that ecological lens, not just, you know, on the environment, but, like, what are we doing for society? What are we doing for individuals?
And how do we find the right balances that make us a great company, not just for today and tomorrow, but for the next ten, twenty, fifty years? Yeah. There's a lot of challenges in that. Absolutely. There are no easy answers. Yeah. And you know, as you mentioned, you know, what you guys do as a business is, there's a lot of there's a lot of tough questions, I suppose.
Something that occurred to me during your talk, and I think it's something that is is getting more airtime in conversations in the tech industry is what are the trade offs that we need to make in, if we want to become, you know, as you've described it, having less human centered design, being more ecological in the way we build products, way we build companies.
Is that does that inevitably mean a reduction in revenues and profitability? Is that is that something we we just need to handle and deal with? Or are there ways around that? How how do you think about that? I think, you know, every time we've started to ask hard questions about what it means to design a product better, we've found new value streams and new ways of, like, increasing affordability, convenience.
You know, constraints are a good thing in product. And I think, you know, when we talk about profitability, for example, that's just one value factor and the innovation that we can unlock and the potential that we can unlock and, like, you know, there's so many other things out there.
And if we look at profit at the expense of everything else, we're kind of missing, you know, part of what it means to be human and the human relationship with technology. I think when we start to think about, like, long term value, you know, I don't think that it's a loss in profitability long term.
Right? Because you have a more sustainable product, which means you can keep making it. You can stay in business. You don't have to worry about, like, scarcity, which like, you know, we've been treating scarcity as if it's not a thing for some parts of, you know, what we build every year, but that's not necessarily a great way to approach it.
Right? And so how do we how might we find a way to use rare earth minerals and some of these other things that are not really replaceable in a way that, like, sets everyone up for success and in a way that, like, makes society better and makes innovation smarter.
And, you know, we've gotten to a point where we care about just in time delivery and just enough manufacturing for, like, making the cars, but then we don't really care about it for how many we should make or how many we should recycle or, you know, some of those other things.
And I think, you know, product thinking has all the grounds for, like, working through some of the hardest challenges in the next fifty years of, like, global human existence in terms of, like, what does it take to manufacture smarter? What are the right questions to be asking?
But to do that well, we're going to have to dig into that and start to ask ourselves some really hard questions about how do we do this better? And, you know, if we unlock those value streams for customers, I think that they'll pay for it.
You know, we've seen that customers really like eco friendly products, and, you know, there is a little bit of danger in bulk washing, which we're gonna hear a little bit about later. But there's also, you know, benefit in actually making products that are sustainable, and people will pay for that because they want to, you know, work with the grain of the universe rather than against it.
Yeah. Yeah. I I agree with that. I think we've seen a lot of examples of that, you know, around things like food and and changes in consumption patterns there. But it does often end up being something that you almost need to be relatively privileged to, to even consider sometimes in our in our current system.
Just wanted to dig into a question or something that you mentioned in the circle of control that in your in your presentation, and you had those three layers of control, influence, and concern. So just in your day to day life, the control part is you know, goes to the the choices that you make with your team.
But what about the the influence where you have to make the case, up the food chain to to people who are making decisions on a strategic level that, you know, are beyond your control, but you've got a passionate view on? How do how do you make the case effectively for more ethical design approach, particularly if it involves, you know, drastic changes to how the business operates or, you know, cuts into the bottom line?
Yeah. Well, that's a good question. I don't think that there's any one formula. Right? But I think one of the things that is really important is understand what your business is trying to achieve and understand the values and the goals that you're working towards and find a way to align your concerns to the overall big picture.
Right? So, like, having more electric cars, for example, knowing some regulations that are pending in the UK, I e, you know, the twenty thirty petrol vehicle ban, it's not a bad thing. Right? So how might we accelerate the number of electric cars that we carry as Kazoo?
For example, might be a question that, like, can advocate for the values that I see and, you know, hold, but also find a way to bridge that gap between my personal passions and who we are as a business. And, you know, I can only speak for myself.
But, you know, I think it's really about working to find those bridges and how do we like and this is maybe one of the things that, you know, is unique to working as a designer is how do you find the possible and make that possible something that other people are willing to buy into, engage with, and believe in.
Right? And that's what designers do every single day is they, you know, they do a form of, like, speculative fiction for business. Right? They prototype things. They cast out ideas, and they start to shape those things and shape possible futures based on the business needs that they see, the customer needs that they see, and synthesizing those into essentially, like, sci fi, if you will, or speculative fiction.
Right? This is a possible future that we can go after. And so thinking about design that way, I think it makes sense that, like, the ecology thinking that I do is just part of that conversation, and it's one possible future that we can create if we work together.
I like the I like the sci fi reference and the the speculative nature of of design. You're you're right, though. And I think I think most designers I know are are optimists by nature. Maybe that's inherent in the in the DNA of designers.
You talked in the in your presentation about widening the lens. And it's it seems like widening the lens is what you're really talking about in all of this is that we all need to have more awareness of the of the wider implications, impacts of our of our actions.
And that I mean, is that is that the ultimate message here? Is that what people in the tech industry and beyond, but we're you know, our audience today is the tech industry. Is that really the message? Yeah, I think so. And, you know, if we increase our awareness and care for each other, you know, is it our responsibility?
Yeah, actually, I think so. You know, few are guilty, but all are responsible is a quote from somebody I studied in college, one of my favorite rabbis. And look, I think that that quote says a lot about what it means to be human.
Right? Like, very few people are guilty of heinous crimes or, you know, the things that are catastrophically, you know, putting our planet and the sustainability of life on it in jeopardy. But, you know, everyone's responsible for doing something, and just because you're at a tech company where, you know, it doesn't necessarily want to think about those things doesn't mean you shouldn't try to advocate for those things.
You know, I think everyone has a responsibility to try to make the world a better place and actually, you know, put their money where their mouth is. And you know, especially if you're a white person in tech with lots of privilege, like, say something.
You know, if you don't say anything, nothing's ever going to change, right? But you can lend yourself to the cause and you can lend yourself to supporting, you know, increasing diversity, pulling in people from underprivileged backgrounds and giving them access to, you know, decision making power in your organization and giving them access to feedback on some of the things that you're trying, right, and, like, actually involving the people that you're designing for, not just in this kind of clinical user research, like, come into our lab and we're in control sort of way,
but actually just talking to people and really understanding the impact of your product can really humanize it. And then asking yourself, am I comfortable with these decisions, and what could we be doing better, and then how do you share that awareness with people who don't necessarily have it?
Because, you know, everyone's doing the best that they can to make decisions based on the values that they hold, and if we can shape those values in any way and have a meaningful discussion about them, we might not always agree, but we can always agree to work together.
Eli, that's that's a very positive message to end on. We're we're pretty much out of time. And I I agree with you. And to be honest, a lot of what you referred to is, stuff that we try to have present in TuringFest from where, for example, putting together the programming, you know, there's there's I I think it's incumbent on us to sort of try and see be the changes that we wanna see in the world a little bit.
So baby steps, but it does feel like some things are definitely going in the right direction. So listen, thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks for a great presentation, interesting chat. I wish we had more time. But we'll we'll figure out another time to do to dig into this more.
Okay, but that's all for today. So thanks so much, Eli. Thank you so much for having me. And I hope the rest of TuringPest goes really well for all of you. Have a great day. Thanks. Take care. Bye. Okay, so tons to digest there for me lie.
And I, it's pretty positive note to end on, I think, because he is fundamentally is a positive person. So and we're going to take a quick break. Now we're back at three pm. UK time with Katie Martell, digging into the fraud world of woke washing and marketing.
So see you in a little while.
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