Corners and Intersections: Community

Um, [laughs] I am designing for the community that I am a part of as an interaction designer.

Um, I have a background in interaction design, and I have formal education in interaction design.

Um, so how I even found out about deceptive design is that someone happened to mention the word dark patterns in my undergrad, and no one really...

We didn't really have a course on it, or we didn't really get to- ... talk about it with each other.

It's just that someone happened to mention it, and then I started doing my own research, and then I started looking into it, um, more.

[laughs] And that ended up in me being interested in the topic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else, uh, sort of even knows what it is by the end of their degree.

Um, so I think looking at how relevant it is in this day and age and looking at how prominent these issues are, um, that's what made me go into this topic in the first place for my master's thesis, is that I wanted to understand why there was a gap in these literacies and how I could address it through pedagogy.

Right.

And so you- do you think there's an important movement from an informal to a formal idea of understanding in the community? So you're listening, someone said a- t- said something about dark matters or dark patterns and, and that was informal, and it kind of sparked this interest in you.

There's not really a formality in this topic for that community, and so there's a movement that you're making from one to-

Exactly

...

the next.

Yeah.

I think, I think that's exactly it.

I feel like the need for formal education just came from the fact that people should just be more aware about this topic, and formal education is one way to, uh, ha- go about that.

Contemporary relationships between designers and the community.

Then it feels like you're in, like, three different communities, so maybe you can talk about-

I am

... that a little bit.

Yeah.

Um, so how I kind of came on this topic was, uh, with my son, who is neurodivergent as well.

And I was, um, doing a review for a product, and I asked him, um, "Would you wear that?" And he said, "Absolutely not.

Um, it's too bulky, and I would be, um, signaled out at school," and all that kind of stuff.

So it got my wheels turning.