Death by Default

In the past few days, you’ve probably pulled a device out of your pocket and taken a photo with it, climbed into the driver’s seat of a car, talked with a friendly customer service chat bot, made a nice pot roast in your instant pot, or searched Google for a recipe for that pot roast. Almost all of the objects and pieces of tech we interact with every day are making thousands of tiny decisions for us—temperatures, apertures, if-this-then-thats. Ever wonder how these decisions were made? Who programmed them? Who designed them, and for whom are they really designed?

The answer is as obvious as it is sad: the default. Default is what’s already there; the result of taking no action and making no manual decisions. It’s the “auto” setting on a DSLR camera, the cruise control, the one-size-fits-all sweater, the “quick-start” method. And it’s not just machines that have default modes; we do too. Ever been asked what you’re doing this weekend? Done any traveling lately? Did you see the game? We go back to the same default topics of conversation even with our closest friends and family. And all of these defaults were created in our brains (and in the algorithms of our machines) for good reason—they build efficiencies and make life easier to manage.

The majority of our experiences are dictated by these default settings that were designed by someone, somewhere, for some sort of default human persona. Take a moment to close your eyes and picture this default human. The doctor. The scientist. The user. The customer. If you’re like most people, you’re thinking of a white, adult male who works a 9-to-5 job, drives a car, lives in a house, and is married with a couple of kids. He is 5 feet 10 inches tall, has full control of all of his limbs and appendages including a dominant right hand, has 20/20 vision and perfect hearing. But just like a one-size-fits-all sweater, default mode and the default human persona—even if it has the most obvious, neutral and strategic intentions—doesn’t really fit a majority of us. We are all individuals with nuanced lives. The default human is a fantasy—a persona that doesn’t actually exist. So why keep settling for it?

In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, author Caroline Criado Perez details the many striking and disturbing ways that our society’s perception of the default human as male has failed us. When our world is designed for men as the default, women are often not considered at all in the shaping of that world, and women suffer as a result of what may seem like the most benign, neutral decisions.

Take, for example, the way cars are designed. Crash test dummies are designed to resemble the typical male, ignoring the many anatomical differences between males and females (upper body muscle mass, neck muscle size and positioning, etc.). Seat belts aren’t designed to accommodate breasts or pregnant bellies, and most women need to adjust the driver’s seat forward in order to reach the peddles, therefore placing our bodies out of the “standard seating position” and into a much more dangerous position in the middle of the driver’s side window. Because there’s a lack of data collected on women’s bodies and car safety, the car is designed without any real consideration for women. So even though female drivers in the US now outnumber male drivers, we’re 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die if we’re in a car crash. (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/invisible-women/)

In Liz Jackson’s talk from the 2019 AIGA conference, she tells the story of meeting the real designer behind Oxo kitchen products. They were designed by (and for) a woman with arthritis, but their grippy handles have become useful and ubiquitous in kitchens across the world. That’s because what’s often designed for the “niche” user actually works better for every user. YouTube’s video caption feature was designed by (and for) a deaf audience, but that technology has evolved into one YouTube’s greatest superpowers in terms of search functionality and user experience.

In the famous “spaghetti sauce” study, the centerpiece of a certain very famous Ted Talk, a prominent food scientist helped put Prego back on top of the market by determining that people actually needed a variety of options—not just one default spaghetti sauce.

When we step outside of default settings and design for the nuances in humanity, it works. So, since we are part of the class of people shaping and developing the world—whether it’s the user experience of a website, the design of an event, the programming of a chat bot, or even the wording of a recipe—I challenge all of us to wake up to the defaults in our lives and to question them, step outside them, and let go of those that don’t serve us in 2020.