By the New Media Design teacher team
Diversity and inclusion are – rightfully so – often debated topics. Think about the #BlackLivesMatter protests, the efforts to increase the number of women in top positions, technology to enhance social participation for people living with disabilities, et cetera. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, diversity is “the condition or quality of being diverse, different, or varied”. This can be about gender, ethnicity, cultural background, religion, age, physical or mental disabilities, et cetera. We live in a diverse world, and an important first step is to acknowledge this. Inclusion goes a step further. Inclusion is about not only acknowledging this diversity but about acting upon it. It is about letting all people participate in society, without thresholds. In an ideal, inclusive world, everything is accessible for anyone. We are respectful to other views, welcoming, willing to listen, willing to learn from each other and take decisions together.
In New Media Design, the importance of a diverse and inclusive society also translates to designing for inclusion and diversity. Several examples of technology design have shown what can go wrong when design teams are not diverse, think about the Gorillas incident in Google Photos’ image recognition algorithm. As designers and design researchers, we believe that we have a responsibility to prevent such issues, and to contribute to diversity and inclusion in society.
This academic year, the theme ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ will receive extra attention in our New Media Design track. The theme will be incorporated in several of our courses.
- In the master’s course Creativity and Innovation, we discuss how making an effort to understand each other’s differences can unlock the potential of diversity in creative collaborations.
- In the master’s course User Experience Design, for instance, we will dive into the ethics of technology design, and the responsibility we, as designers, have to prevent adverse unintended consequences of our designs, such as exclusion and discrimination. We will practice with anticipating such unintended consequences by means of futuring exercises and creating design fictions.
- In the master’s course Interactive Storytelling, students will design and publish an interactive digital narrative on the topic of diversity & inclusion. Narratives – and interactive narratives even more so – are a powerful instrument to get to know other perspectives. They enable you to take on the position of someone completely different from yourself, to see the world through their eyes and act as if you are this other person. This helps in moving away from stereotypes to a deep understanding and awareness for different points of views, challenging and enriching your worldview.
- A last example is our bachelor course Play and Game, in which gaming culture and inclusive game design are important topics of discussion. The gaming scene has long suffered, and is still suffering from various types of toxic behavior and a lack of inclusion. To a large extent, this stems from the fact that this field, including the players as well as anyone involved in the development and publishing of games, is traditionally dominated by young, white men, which has resulted in all kinds of conscious and unconscious biases, with far-reaching consequences. Ironically, although games can be especially beneficial for people with disabilities, a lot of games are currently not playable for them because there are no accessibility options. Fortunately, thanks to several advocates who are not afraid to speak up and take action, the field is slowly but surely becoming more inclusive and accessible. In this course, we try to increase our awareness of these aspects of game design that are unfortunately still commonly overlooked.
We will report back to you via this blog with the results of these endeavors later this academic year!