Week 9 - Almost everyone showed up.

    Today was the first time the whole group was together barred one member. We discussed a plan for next week and made a to-do list. I'm pretty sure there are 2 members of the group that are getting a free ride which is rather frustrating. The flip side of that coin is they can't be trusted to handle anything any of the tasks without supervision.  

The team does have a solid plan moving forward and we've assigned ourselves some tasks to bring to the next class to start assembling our presentation. 

One member of our group has even come up with a great tagline for our fake company: 

"Being unbiased isn't just for pride month." 

I'll be taking on the task of creating a mock-up of our interviewing software as well as creating some 'fake tweets' of real companies to give our audience an idea of how our product could market itself with companies wanting their customers/shareholders to know they are actively trying to eliminate biases in the workplace. 

We had a rough outline of our slides for the second presentation and realised that we had not really referred to the whole reason we were doing this assessment in the first place. After reflecting on our wicked problem further into the semester I was amazed with how far our group had come. I do not think I necessarily had an opinion on design being the answer to wicked problems, but I realised design is not just moving shapes around my computer screen. Victor Margolin suggests “design occupies a strategic position between the sphere of dispositional ethics and the sphere of social change.”. 

Since realising that we had become detached from our ‘wicked problem’ some of us went away and did some research about the real issues: sexism and racism. Initially I thought we would be thinking more about 3rd world countries, but it hit home quickly that really, the biggest culprits of these human bias are actually 1st world countries, especially Australia; In a 2022 Global report, Australia was condemned as one of the above-average sexist countries! The study highlighted that Australian men have some of the most sexist views in the Western world?! Horrifying. Anyway, all this research further fuelled the initial inspiration for the idea and highlighted the importance of the problem we were trying to solve. 

IPSOS, The Global Institute for women’s Leadership. (2022). International Women’s Day 2022. Global Report: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/giwl/assets/iwd-survey-2022.pdf 

Wahl, D. (2017, April 29th). Facing Complexity: Wicked Design Problems. Age of Awareness.  https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/facing-complexity-wicked-design-problems-ee8c71618966.