Design in Everyday Life

Context

Design is all around us and as technologies advance its ubiquity is evident. But, have you really stopped to think about whether the world is designed for us? Design in Everyday Life investigates the world around us through design, observes the biases that are embedded in our lived realities, and ways in which we can attempt to make the world a better place. In an active effort to demystify the technologies used to build our world, SAW students spent time learning how to code. This website is the synthesis of those coding lessons and serves as an archive of all the things we've learned together.

Findings

Manipulative / addictive design

Many websites and apps like social media or food delivery are integrating addictive and manipulative psychological tools into their design to persuade the audience to use their platform even more. An example of this is that if you were to decide to take a couple days of a break from social media, that app will start flooding your email with notifications. This is an unhealthy way to market products because as you can see in these pictures, our emails become bombarded with all types of notifications from a bunch of web platforms.

Inaccessible design

The Fine Arts Annex and the Reuse Depot are examples of a place on the Mills College campus where accessible design is not accommodated. The stairs that lead up to the building makes it difficult for people with physical disabilities, and there could’ve been a ramp or other special modifications for efficient accessibility. The clothing provided at the reuse depot doesn’t include a wide range of sizes as well.

Bias technology/spaces

Mills is historically known to pride themselves off of the few people who attend that contribute to the diversity aspects of their institution. When searching through past archives on Mills.edu from before the 2000s, we found remnants of what was the Diversity Committee at Mills. This was started by students, staff, and faculty to address complaints of the lack of diversity at Mills and protest against their performative statements that claimed their diversity policies were prominent. Since the late 1900s, Mills has altered these diversity statements to not only advertise students of color, but also students of varying social classes, sexualities, genders, etc. Workplaces and academic institutions often utilize tokenism, the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to recruit a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of racial equality. Over the span of the 2000s decade, the official Mills website includes a diversity section where they express their dedication to creating an inclusive and diverse environment on campus, and uses images of “tokenized” racial minorities to spread this agenda, especially when they pertain to a specific cause.