A larger discussion about implications of gendered experiences in designed digital privacy, unintended exposure, and digital security divide.
TLDR
There’s been an increasing gender disparity in digital behaviors and perceived Internet privacy because of disproportionate gendered experiences. This affects women more than men, indicating a much larger implication of reproduction of social inequality and structural discrimination in digital contexts. We should only expect the rise of such experiences with end-to-end encryption platforms, bad design choices, and constantly changing privacy regulations.
A terrible Capitol riot has triggered a series of challenging questions around technological objectivity and neutrality: the socio-technical meaning of blocking Trump from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, a mass migration of far-right and QAnon groups to end-to-end encryption…
Hands-on Tutorials
Rethinking design accessibility in the world of data visualizations. The anatomy of a data visualization and visualizing for accessibility.
Data journalism is an emerging field due to the amount of open data that journalists now can leverage to find new stories, extract insights and findings, and produce a powerful story with cutting edge technologies. As Meredith Levien, the current CEO at the New York Times, has said “We live in the golden age of marriage between digital affordances and quality journalism.” Today I am going to share one aspect of this field — data storytelling.
Table of Contents
1. Defining data storytelling. 2. The anatomy of an accessible data visualization. 3. Visualization for accessibility - data sonification with an example of representing…
As designers and engineers, we have to be aware that the risk of users suffering psychological trauma will steadily increase as V.R. technology advances. The deconstruction of VR through philosophical, technological, ethical, and cognitive lenses.
Table of Contents:
1. Philosophical Lens. A set of important theories about why and how art affects us.2. Technological Lens. What does it have to do with Virtual Reality?3. Ethical Lens. Why we need Code of Ethics for VR?4. Cognitive Lens. How VR especially its apotheosis in virtual embodiment intensifies as it draws us more into the medium with which we’re playing?
Virtual reality as a technology simply intensifies a set of debates about art — whether it is contagious and bad for society, whether it is imitative and good for society — we’ve been having for a long time.
Philosophical Lens. A set of important theories about why and how art affects us
…
Communicating the value of design is one of the most essential skills that I learned through my work at early-stage startups. In places, where design is on the way to becoming a leading voice of a product and design system is yet to be established, it’s a responsibility for any designer (even an intern) to help others understand the design process and its impact on business strategy.
Why negotiations?
While taking a joint negotiations class at Haas Business School and Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, I realized some of the key concepts formalized the way I was communicating and justifying my design choices to co-founders while working at Fireflies.ai and Hallo. Even now at the New York Times, oftentimes I have to negotiate my design work with product managers and editors to get it done in an efficient & timely manner.
After talking to several people, I am also envisioning this article to be particularly helpful for designers at design agencies. Oftentimes when cooperating with clients…
Social networks have originated dozens years before social media has become ubiquitous on the Internet. Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, is considered to be the founding father of social network research.
Simmel asked the questions on how people related to each other and introduced the term of ‘formal’ sociology. ‘Formal’ means that the attention is more emphasized on the nature of connections and the amount rather than their content. Beginning from the 1950s this approach has been used by a lot of American sociologists, however, in a slightly different context.
Researchers started analyzing the nature of connections that originated in…
Modern political data industry, creating new opportunities for political manipulation and anti-democratic strategy, is the result of some weaponized data-driven designed systems that lead to problematic outputs, affecting large scale communities.
Data-driven technology is an unavoidable attribute of modern political campaigns. Some people agree that it is an excellent addition to politics as a necessary contemporary approach to democratic processes, while others argue that it decreases trust in already flawed systems in politics. Given the fact the mass communication has already been replaced by more and more individualized communication, it’s fair to claim that the use of these technologies in political campaigning is not going away; in fact, we can only expect its sophistication. For this reason, the techniques and methods need to be carefully examined. …
There is no universal definition of design thinking (DT). But for me, it’s one of the lenses to look at the world to tackle complex challenges that are multifaceted and intrinsically human. The first time I got introduced to design thinking was in a public policy space, specifically in the European Youth Parliament.
In a knit-tight collaboration with policy makers & governors, young people like me applied design thinking to write well-intentioned policy proposals to address a wide range of social issues from education and sustainability to economic affairs and GDPR. …
Three years ago I found out my friend had dyslexia. How can design help ease reading and writing process for people with dyslexia?
I was an Editor in Chief for the magazine Literati during my senior year of high school in New Hampshire. It was a pretty hectic time, when everyone was busy with writing essays, finishing up art portfolios, and preparing for SATs. But I was so so lucky to be in an absolutely non-competitive, friendly environment during that time, where we helped each other every night and where our college counselors stayed up till 12 am to help every student.
Funny story, but I didn’t even consider applying to Berkeley at all. It was actually one of my closest friends, who…
We all have the power to enact small and big changes in our communities. Self-defense can be a stepping stone for a larger conversation for areas in the world where violence occurs but never gets reported.
Today young women live in the world of incredible opportunities and possibilities, but also the world of tremendous challenges and serious risks, especially in developing countries as India.
Four years before the #MeToo movement began, Pooja Nagpal founded her own non-profit with the mission to mentally and physically empower generations of girls to lead lives free of violence. Her self-defense initiative became a part of the dialogue that goes beyond a hashtag. Today, she is an activism supporter, a 3rd-year junior at UC Berkeley, and a project developer in Blueprint.
Pooja created a special self-defense curriculum for rural villages of…
In the nearest 10 years Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be smarter, quicker, and more universal. It will become the most powerful competitive advantage.
70 years ago scientists proposed two approaches to the creation of Artificial Intelligence. They were both based on brain simulations, strict rules, and logic. Today, thanks to the development and transformation of those methods, neural networks can easily recognize faces, understand human speech, and even make decisions.
20 years ago change management demanded such traits as stability, while nowadays almost every enterprise values flexibility. Can we define it another way — one that welcomes digital transformation? …
Karina Nguyen
design & eng @NYTimes | data, cs + ethics research student @UCBerkeley | prev. @Dropbox, @UN
