Designers using UX techniques are in a great position to leverage their user-centered approach to design applications that not only affect users but also social systems as a whole. Still, there exists significant room for UX designers to help expand the reach of these technologies that carry the capability of transforming systems and there embedded politics.
UX techniques played a large role in the research and design of our recent application, Baked Potato, which focuses on allowing consumers the ability to better understand the the connection between the food they buy and their individual and cultural preferences. This article will cover five key moments in our process highlighting the different methods we found useful, and how they are relevant for taking a UX approach towards social change:
- Defining the social justice issue
- Observing injustice in the field
- Visually representing the data collected
- Building behavior-driven prototypes
- Rethinking the functional specification
Claim: If you cannot define it, you cannot see it.
It is impossible to understand the complexity of a system you intend to change without a working theory which allows you both to observe the issue and describe it to others. People who are interested in designing for social change need to read social theorists, because they provide a model for understanding social behavior.
The activities surrounding food are some of the most fundamental activities that we make as human beings. Despite the variety abundance of food in modern grocery stores it is our belief that consumers are not provided the relevant information they need or desire to make informed decisions about the food products purchase that support their individual, social, or cultural preferences.
We settled on using Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression,” which served as a useful heuristic for providing a means by which we could understand how the current system promotes injustice. She defined injustice as: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence, and gave examples of what to look for. We identified both powerlessness and cultural imperialism as mitigating factors that negatively affected shoppers’ decision-making. For example, many people make decisions on food quality, nutrition, and safety based upon the labels found on products. What appears on these labels, however, either does not provide consumers with enough information or misrepresents aspects of a product and its company.
We identified this as powerlessness because consumers neither have the power to control what information is provided on labels nor do they have access to adequate information. The ability to identify injustice provides a foundation for social change. Although, there is no right way to define your issue, using a social theorist like Iris Marion Young is a good starting point for defining the issues around social change.
