Filters: Considering Design Methods and Tools
Design tools, methods, and technologies often present themselves as neutral or general-purpose in nature, as things that can be used by anyone, for anything. This makes it easy to lose sight of the values and histories that inhere within a tool—the priorities that it emphasizes, and the perspectives that it ignores. These values shape a design practice, both explicitly and implicitly. When considering a design tool offered by industry or elsewhere, and when critiquing our own, it's valuable to take time to reflect on its nature and biases, and consider ways a tool or method might be critically reappropriated.
A different way to conceptualize the design resources, approaches, techniques, and technologies we use is as filters. In contrast to tools or methods—which often carry the baggage of an implied neutrality or objectivity—filters can be understood as active, non-neutral constructs that help us to focus or understand certain aspects of a design more clearly. But a filter always also implies a loss; something is removed, discarded, or rendered invisible by its use. Different kinds of filters can be combined and used alongside each other, and can help to represent different perspectives. Filters, then, are things we can question, critique, and fine-tune in our design practice, while remaining aware of how they have the capacity both to simultaneously help and to exclude.
When selecting a design tool or resource, we have to take the time to reflect on how it participates in (often hidden) systems of power:
Who made this, and why?
Who profits from its use or its propagation? (easy answers like “its free, so no one profits” don’t count)
Who does it speak to; who is its audience? Are these the only people who should be part of its process?
- How does it represent its own use and its users? What cultural, class, race, gender, and other assumptions does it make, or represent itself with?
What does it explicitly value? (e.g. greater efficiency, productivity? Or connectedness, change?) Are those values appropriate to bringing about systemic change?
What labour and social relations does it assume or create? (User/owner, worker/manager, host/guest, content consumer/author, etc.)
What forms of user does it construct, and what values and assumptions are implicit in this construction? (e.g ability and bodies, names and identities, roles and capacities, individual or working with/assisted, etc.)
- What forms of privilege circulate? Access to technology, financial independence, family structures, hierarchies, knowledge or education requirements
How are emotions assumed and valued, and to what social or political ends? What options for negativity are available? Resistances, frictions, obstacles or objections to the natural “user flow”?
How is consent voiced? Can it be revoked, reconsidered, or provided in non-binary ways?
How is trust conceived? Through transparency of actions and their impacts, or through branding?
What forms of ownership are expressed? Centralized? Cooperative? State-supported?
What models of governance and decision-making inhere? Who decides the roadmap, priorities, features, financial responsibilities?
What words and metaphors are used?
Some values that are often neglected in design practices and tools:
Interdependence - a “user” isn’t always an individual, but often working with others to make decisions and share work or responsibility
Identities in flux - personal identities, consent, and trust change and are contingent. When we gather personal information, we should support foundational change without stigma
Creativity - use is often inseparable from creation, mismatch and mistfit often generate uniquely valuable self-awareness and knowledge
Community and non-binary roles - people often simultaneously play different roles, assume different identities at different times and places in their life; they make decisions, spend money, and work with others