25: A Stark Difference in Design
Hey! Welcome to this week’s Stark Difference in Design. As you may have noticed, we didn’t send an email last week due to me (Cat) ending up with a moderate concussion and sprained neck (courtesy of the unpowdery and very icy mountain in New Jersey when snowboarding). Apologies in advance for any inability to properly use the syntax of English.
Last Edition No. 24 had a 47% open rate. The most popular link was What the Dog Saw for the bookworms. 💌
Tidbits
+ Making a path to ethical, more socially-beneficial AI
With this new college, we could not just diversify tech, but technify everything else and really work on the hardest problems together in a collaborative way. Feeding 22 million children in a free and reduced lunch program is a big data problem…and it's the kind of computing I think we should do on inequality and poverty.
US CTO @smithmegan looks forward to more cross-disciplinary collaborations between leaders from government, philanthropy, academia, and more for the public good.
+ How My Brain Damaged Mother Changed How I Looked at Interface Design
cognitive accessibility isn’t just relevant for people with brain damage, like my mother. It’s relevant to everyone, from people with migraines to neophytes in emerging markets who don’t have software translated yet into their local languages.
and
The interfaces of the future won’t be static; they will morph and change beneath our touch like a bubble, anticipating our needs and wants based on deep, intimate knowledge of who we are.
Designers often overlook cognitive disabilities when designing for other limitations like low vision and motor skill impairments. All equally important, so why pick one over the other? Maybe our inability to use the internet (impairment or not) isn’t due to our aging and technology evolving so quickly we can’t keep up. Maybe we’re just using interfaces that haven’t been designed to account for our abilities.
This is a MUST READ and yes I realize I just aged the team by putting that in bold and italicizing it. It should be part of every digital product designer’s required reading in order to even touch design software.
+ Podcast: Accessibility is not a “nice to have”
Why do companies de-prioritize accessibility? Making a digital map accessible to the blind. Pros and cons of the straw test. Why simulating a disability is not the same as working with disabled people. Using Twitter threads to prototype book chapters. How diversity (including neurodiversity and diversity of ability) makes for a better product. Changing small habits in your life leads to changing big ones.
Jeffrey Zeldman linked up with Derek Featherstone (@feather), Chief eXperience Officer of @LevelAccessa11y for a really in depth convo around accessibility, disability, and creating better products.
For bookworms
+ When Breath Becomes Air
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Chew on that and brace yourself. Author Dr. Paul Kalanithi faces his disease full on with every word and page. It's easy to forget when reading it that he wrote it while dying. When Breath Becomes Air reminded me what it means to be brave. In a death-avoiding culture, we often find solace with the reassurance that one will "beat the disease". But rarely grant ones self the gift to face it head on and still be vulnerable as we accept the time given.
As I read through, keeping up with Paul's dance with his disease, I realized: Cancer isn't judgmental, racist and couldn't care less about social hierarchy. Cancer (more often than not) disables—be it the patient and/or their loved ones, temporarily or permanently. Combine all of the above, and you have yourself a gut-wrenching and beautiful read. I found myself wondering: How could something be so peaceful yet so aggressive? So dominant yet submissive. From the story to the epilogue, I've yet to read any literature that speaks of cancer in the most elegant way.
What’s new from Stark
+ Accessible Design in Sketch & Adobe XD with Stark
Huge thanks to @albertojorsini for the Stark v2 review! To answer his questions:
Yep, we're already working with @InVisionApp and @figmadesign to port Stark over to their design tools.
Windows? Not on the roadmap. We're loving Mac these days though 🙈
Our end game? The product for accessible & inclusive design. 🖤
+ Stark is coming to Creative South!
Both myself (Cat) and Michael (@_fookay) will be at Creative South this year and were stoked. I’ll be speaking but we’ll be together and around to talk shop on all things design, accessibility, and more while eating some real good BBQ food. Want to link up? Let us know. We’d love to meet.
Go get your tickets now!
Liked this newsletter? Let us know. And we’re always talking shop on Twitter @getstarkco or in our community chat.
–Team Stark