Re:Changes at Basecamp
by cutemonster on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @03:54PM
(#26973396)
It seems to me that buildings and medicine and cars and gym equipment and everything, need to be usability tested on all groups of people: short, tall, men, women, black, white, thin, fat, old, young, wheelchair, blind, deaf.
But I don't think all those groups of people need to take part in the construction work.
It'd be nice with more diversity in tech. So please don't misunderstand. I just think that there are other better examples of how diversity is good.
(Usability testing: Testing early prototypes I suppose -- it's not that easy to redo, say, a car, once it's in production.)
> keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies),
That thought makes me feel upset! (Although I'm not a human. But I am tall) Thanks for a good example
Is it a "pretty grotesque" sense of entitlement at work when a man looks for a urinal in a public building? Or when a disabled person looks for the wheelchair ramp? These things have half utility at best by your "obvious metric".
Take this further: imagine architecture firms were staffed mostly (80%+) by women. They keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies), they don't provide urinals and so on.
Is it a wild assumption that having more men – or, god, "experts in catering to men (who might be men but also women)" - on their teams would help address these repeated own goals? Or do we need to spend years getting the data that shows us the real, mysterious, non-political underlying cause of this gender bias in buildings?