Mike Monteiro writing for the Adobe Blog:
When I was a little baby designer I was taught that good design meant simplifying. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. Make the system as efficient as possible. As few templates as possible. I’m sure the same goes for setting up style sheets, servers, and all that other shit we do. My city would run more efficiently if we simplified everything.
But I wouldn’t want to live there.
My city is a mess. My country is a mess. The internet is a mess. But in none of those cases is the answer to look for efficiencies, but rather to celebrate the differences. Celebrate the reasons the metro stops aren’t all the same. Celebrate the crooked streets. Celebrate the different voices. Celebrate the different food smells. Understand that other people like things you don’t. And you might like things they don’t. And it’s all cool! That’s what makes this city, and all cities, a blast. And when all these amazing people, some of them who we don’t understand at all, go online they are going to behave as inefficiently in there as they do out there. And that is awesome.
And your job, the glorious job you signed up for when you said you wanted to be a designer, is to support all of these people. Make sure none of these incredible voices get lost. And to fight against those who see that brilliant cacophony as a bug and not the greatest feature of all time.
You are our protection against monsters.
The call for diversity resonates with me. (It’s the subject of the keynote I’ll be delivering at World IA Day 2019.) Being aware of the distinctions we are creating (or perpetuating) is particularly important for designers who are working on the information architecture of these systems, since the structures we create tend to be longer-lived than other parts of the information environment.
That said, it’s impossible for the systems we create—and the structures that underlie them—to represent every point of view. Designers must make choices; we must take positions. How do we determine what voices to heed among the cacophony? In order to know, we must ask another set of questions: what is this information environment ultimately in service to? What am I in service to? Are the two aligned?