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Text: Design Matters, the Sketchnote Edition. Handdrawn sketch with bold red and blue highlights.

In June, I attended Design Matters Tokyo. It was my first design conference in a while and I was happy to get back to sketchnoting talks throughout the day. I'll be showcasing three talks I had the pleasure of sketchnoting during the conference.

How design bridges worlds: my in-betweenness story.

First up was Leecy Li with her talk “How design bridges worlds: my in-betweenness story.” She covers her colorful career going from exhibition design to designing Google Workspaces and her learnings around empathy spanning the perspective and cultural divide.

Title: Design Matters 24 Tokyo. Themes of this conference are 'Craftsmanship Strikes Back!,' 'Design, what's next?,' and 'How to design a society.' Let's get started with the first talk. A sketch of a woman with red highlights in her hair. She is Leecy Li. A quote is next to her that reads, Every pixel is an opportunity to delight. She begins the talk, 'I went from Motorola in China to Parsons in New York. Thinking about exhibition design in museums (my former job prior to Motorola) got me thinking about user centered design. I started working at Google. I went from everything being colorful...' Image of people of varying shapes and sizes looking at a wall, 'to boxes.

She continues, 'Here, I learned that you do not equal your user. Rather, you see the user. When I was managing ad design at Google we had lots of team meetings balancing the requests of user research, engineering, other designers, etc. This was around the time I started testing our own product to see what users actually saw. Next learning I got was...you see yourself. Around this time in my career I thought I could understand anyone. And then I joined a different team. Every day, it felt like...' Sketch of someone struggling to push a rock up a hill. 'Pushing a rock up a hill. And ultimately realized, no matter if the challenge is interesting, you have to enjoy your work first and foremost. I moved teams to Google Workspace, mapping out flows for editing and commenting on documents in Google Docs.'

'This is where I learned that design is your day to day. This is where you see everyone. When you find something similar in everyone, you see yourself in them.' Sketch of four cards in black and white with people of varying abilities on them. 'I made inclusive cards for Google, based off of Microsoft's inclusive design to show that each of us shares something similar with someone who may be disabled. Can't use your arm? Well, you might be someone who has an amputated arm. Or a temporary injury. Or carrying a child with one hand. The need is the same. Design is for everyone.' She ends by providing links to her socials, which I've written below.

I think in particular this talk was good to keep in mind as “empathy” is often a nebulous concept—in principle, we in design agree that empathy is a good thing, but who specifically warrants empathy or care when designing large-scale software is often hotly debated.

Leecy Li's Medium / website / instagram

Vision Design: Collecting Signs of the Future

Next was Yumiko Tanaka with her talk “Vision Design: Collecting Signs of the Future.” Yumiko works as the head of experience design at Koel Design, which is doing some interesting work into researching the far future of Japan's aging communities. As Japan's population ages, Koel was tasked with doing research on what Japan's future might look like in terms of work, connecting diverse cultures, and building a vibrant town.

A handdrawn sketch of a Japanese woman wearing glasses. Text reads, 'Vision Design: Four Steps of Future Foresight. First, researching the present. Then, formulating the hypothesis about the near future. Then verifying in the farther future. Last, creating a vision for the future. These are the steps Koel Design has taken in their recent design projects.' Yumiko says, 'There is a persistent aging population in Japan, and is something that is often talked about. We do not have enough workers to continue some of the work that our aging population is doing - so how do we make thriving cities with the elderly in mind? First, we formulated three questions: What does work look like for 50+ people? How do we build a vibrant town? and How do we connect a diverse culture? We went to Ato, Yamaguchi, Obama, Nagasaki, and Nagata-ku, Kobe to research each of these questions. Ato is known for their thriving aging population, Obama is known for a town that has revitalized itself as an art community, and Nagata is known for its diverse cultural heritage. From this we formulated three hypotheses--it is essential to find new roles and shift, regional revitalization requires resources, and finally...not looking for assimilation but build bridges between cultures.'

She continues, 'Ultimately, sustainable towns have initiatives and structures for building relationships.' She dives into some analysis they did about Nagata, how people of different cultures got along and found out the town has many levels of support for people who just moved to Nagata. For instance, people who provide support to international residents, people in Nagata who have ties to multicultural residents, and people who have daily interactions with immigrants. Through these three, interactions become normalized. The townsfolk moves from understanding differences to asking the multicultural community to participate in decision making. She wraps up, 'We learned a lot. We have all of these written in our Note online as well as our book, Vision Design.'

Koel publishes regular articles on their work through their website and Note (JP only).

Designing technology that gives disabled people a voice

Finally, thank you to James Reichelt for his talk “Designing technology that gives disabled people a voice.”

James works at Smartbox, a company that designs and manufactures Grid, an AAM (Alternative Access Method) or communication device to empower people to communicate through eye tracking or simple touchtype-based inputs.

A sketch of a white man wearing square glasses. He has a beart and his hair is tied into a bun. He starts, 'This is a talk on inclusive design. I work at Smartbox. We create software and services that give disabled people a voice. Our platform is Grid. It is an alternative access method of voice generation linked to inputs that can be controlled through keyboards and eye trackers.' There is a sketch of a grid device - a square touch panel with different types of icons on various buttons. 'Each interface is used differently by our users.'

He continues, 'so we need to make multiple solutions to complex needs. For instance, take a traditional keyboard. When we think about taking a keyboard on Grid, we need to take into account that it needs to be access by eyes scanning the grid. Closer spacing on the keyboard and rearranging the keys to ones that the user uses the most can reduce eye fatigue. Remember, access needs change over time. For instance, our users may have degenerative diseases, potentially switching medication, etc. And AAC is slow. This results in communication compression. Take text input, when you text someone. It could take 3 seconds to type, Coffee Please. Whereas someone who is using eye tracking must shift from one character to the next. It can take up to 30 seconds. Many of our customers want shortcuts for faster communication.'

So how do we solve for shortcuts? For instance, using emoji, like a smile for 'yes' and a shocked face for 'oh!' Another thing we can use is predictive text. James continues, you know, disability can be isolating but communication is everywhere. Being able to communicate with others can open doors for you. So another example of design for browsing the internet - for example, we add a bottom bar for accessing common websites, similar to a smart TV for Netflix. So what can you do when you're developing? Take a look at WCAG and Access Needs. Go to w3.org/WAI to check that out. Web Accessibility has done a lot of work in suggestions on making your site more accessible. And if your site is accessible, then it does us a huge favor for developing them for AAC devices. Let's talk more about our inclusive design process. We did a project called The Abandonment Project.

Abandonment means when devices get abandoned. At best this is a waste of time and resources. At worst, someone doesn't have a voice. So we want to know what causes our customers to abandon their devices and what we can do to reduce friction in our interface in communicating. And the thing is...you CANNOT design for disables people without including disabled people from the beginning. Sure, our user is the direct user of the AAC device, but some second hand users are family, friends and carers who are interacting with the user on a daily basis. Third hand users are doctors and therapists that see the user on a semi-regular basis to help with medical treatment. All of these people are actively interacting with the user. So we apply a few important rules for interviewing people with disabilities that I'd like to share. One: you must set your meeting agenda ahead of time. This means anyone who needs time to process can read beforehand. Two: communicate expectations. Make sure everyone understands how they can contribute so they are empowered to give feedback -- and they will! Three: allow for feedback time after the meeting. Participants need time to process and to reply. Some participants will use eye tracking which means typing an email will take time and be exhausting for them. We want to reduce fatigue as much as we can, so we make as many time buffers as possible.

And lastly, Take time to ask how people would like to be interviewed. This can take the form of email outlines, pre-sent questions, ensuring yes and no questions to keep the conversation going, and video/messenger/email is ok. Our focus group was our advisory board, helping us prototype and was critical in our process. And our final takeaway I'd like to leave you with is that when you design alongside people with disabilities, you will always end up with a diversity of ideas that will impact your whole organization. That's the beauty of designing with. Building bridges for everyone. Thank you.

His stories on designing with the Grid community seem like common sense—but unfortunately, that hasn't always been the case. Smartbox and other companies who have user focus groups and workshops like these and are thinking critically on how to make their products more accessible are, in my opinion, should become the norm for companies big and small.

You can check out Smartbox's Grid here. After the talk, James recommended for anyone wanting to get into public sector design Cyd Harrell's A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide.

I heard a lot of great talks and got to meet some cool folks.

Something that struck me that day is how small and connected the international design community in Tokyo is. Some of us have worked with each other in some capacity—others just know one another from meetups. Despite its size, the community is close knit. We help each other.

And it was nice to reconnect. I hope everyone I've met has been having a nice summer, and hope you enjoyed the sketchnotes. To the speakers, if you'd like the high-res versions of my sketchnotes, please email me at cj@studioterranova.net and I'll send them to you.

To folks that liked my sketchnotes: I run workshops on sketchnoting and teaching LGBTQ+ literacy to software designers and developers. I do on-site and remote. You can check out some of the workshops and talks I've done here. If you're interested in either, get in touch.