During the earliest day of dot-org, I borrowed this quote to succinctly express what I hoped dot-org would become in the world. This past year, we’ve made strides to clarify what and how we operate. We started the year working with Glide to pilot a new service, Glide Goods. Our mission—Transforming Communities by Design—was born in March with an engagement model that set clear expectations with both nonprofits and the design associates who would work these opportunities. In September, we organized our first BarnRaise in partnership with Illinois Institute of Design. I’m so excited about 2017 and the prospect of a new year; I could go on and on about how I feel dot-org has impacted everyone it has touched, but instead, I think it’s even better to have those people tell you themselves.

Participating in BarnRaise was one of the most impactful moments of 2016 for me. Not only because we spent a few awesome days of caffeine-fueled and paper-prototype-full design making, but because the solutions we came up with were immediately embraced and implemented by our partner FamilyHouse. Dot-org arranged an event unlike any other I have participated in—connecting design leads, students, and nonprofits around the goal of democratizing design. One of dot-org’s core beliefs is that design should not be a luxury, and that is exactly what BarnRaise was all about. Our two representatives from Family House not only participated in the weekend design jam session, but loved what we did so much that they had us come present to their board so that the solutions we created could be immediately implemented at their amazing new facility. This event was one that bridged the gap between design and business, between complex challenges and tangible solutions, and most importantly between cohabitants of this vibrant city we call home. –Alida Draudt

Working on dot-org projects has been extremely energizing and fulfilling. My normal, everyday work at Capital One is meaningful, but working with nonprofits through dot-org feels so incredibly significant, needed, and it makes me feel deeply connected to my community. I love that this company provides a way for us to share the love with those who need it most through projects and events like BarnRaise.  –Rachel Posman

When this year started, I was dealing with a host of heavy personal issues; I was in a selfish and brooding place. Our team’s learnings and contributions to Family House for BarnRaise helped me to shake off those cobwebs by widening my design reach to a truly magical cause and broadening my perspective on what is and isn’t important in my work and in life.  –Van Sedita

Participating in the dot-org office hours this year gave me an opportunity to use what I’ve learned at Capital One in a new context. It’s an interesting challenge to explain what we do to a group of people that normally doesn’t have access to the services we provide, and it was a good learning experience to be able to take on more responsibilities in this narrowed context.  –Andrea Fineman

As designers, it’s vital for us to continuously challenge ourselves and gain new perspectives and experiences. It just makes us better at what we do. Dot-org allows Capital One’s Designers to do that while giving back, bringing our skills to nonprofits that may see design as a luxury—something out of reach. It’s incredibly rewarding and empowering.This year I had the honor of working with an amazing team of people at GLIDE to co-design and launch a new service that is giving GLIDE’s clients unprecedented access to desperately needed products, and giving GLIDE staff the opportunity to connect earlier and more meaningfully with clients while empowering their staff and volunteers to gain new retail skills. Capital One’s commitment to dot-org helps ONE Designers do good while doing well. Through dot-org, I’ve gained leadership experience, got connected to a broader design and nonprofit community, and became a better designer by designing outside my comfort zone!  –Nick Crampton

Dot-org has given me the chance to participate in helping my community. Between BarnRaise planning, curriculum development for nonprofit design education, and office hours, I have had the chance to work with amazing people and really see a difference being made around me. The dot-org work has been some of the most fulfilling work that I have done at Capital One. I’m really excited to see some of our courses being launched in 2017 and to BarnRaising around the country!  –Jessica Kessin

Our work at BarnRaise resulted in a brand new way to give to La Cocina a membership program that, with monthly donations, will engage our community and provide us with much needed support for the work we do to provide women and immigrants with an opportunity to launch and grow food businesses. You can learn more about our membership program here: www.lacocinasf.org/donate_monthly. We can’t thank AdaptivePath.org enough for providing us with the tools to get our membership project off the ground! So far we have signed up 25 members and are hoping for many more before the end of the year! –Leticia Landa, La Cocina

At this year’s BarnRaise, Sequence and GLIDE came together to improve the welcome experience for current participants and new visitors at GLIDE. Using service design practices such as empathy exercises, bodystorming and business origami, the two organizations produced color coded iconography and visual markers to improve wayfinding and the general welcome experience at GLIDE.  –Barbara Lin, Glide Foundation

We are so grateful to AdaptivePath.org for opening their doors to Juma. Not only did you generously allowed us to use your beautiful space for a volunteer & donor cultivation event, but you provided invaluable support leading up to and during the event. This event allowed us to launch CollegeSet.org—a fundraising platform that helps raise funds to match our students’ college savings.  –Lucia Fernandez-Palacios, JUMA

Thank you all so much on behalf of Family House! The BarnRaise weeend was absolutely incredible and I am so inspired by the work that was produced in one and a half days. Your creativity, dedication and ability to empathize with our families really showed in the high quality of work that was produced. –Karen Banks, Family House

For more information on what we did in 2016, please check out AdaptivePath.org Annual Report.

Finding your way in a new place for the first time can be intimidating and confusing for anyone.  But finding your way in a crowd, through a building with minimal signage, narrow, winding corridors, and rooms that are used for multiple purposes at different times, can be especially disorienting; this is easily compounded when clients come with low literacy or English language comprehension skills, and little knowledge of what to expect or where to go to get the services they need.

Glide is a wonderful non-profit in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, that provides much needed services and programs in Wellness, Growth, Spirit and Leadership to people in the surrounding community and beyond. Clients are referred to Glide through support networks, or may come in on their own. They are often coming in with feelings of anxiety and stress, from difficult situations. They may come for the free meals and needle exchange programs, but can easily miss out on the many other services offered because of the difficulty in discovering what Glide has to offer. New volunteers coming in for the first time can also find it difficult to figure out where to go to get started.

When we came to Glide for our first in-person meeting, we immediately noticed how difficult it was to orient ourselves after entering the bustling lobby. There was a front desk, but no receptionist. We saw offices with sinks and showers that hinted at their original residential purpose, and several floors of long, narrow corridors and rooms with makeshift signage that often had to change according to the time-of-day when it would be used for other purposes. Glide’s programs and the use of this building has grown organically over the years to meet the growing and changing needs of the surrounding community, but the signage and other wayfinding affordances have not kept up. 

For this year’s BarnRaise SF, September 9-11, Glide is partnering with Sequence (a kick-ass Design firm specializing in connecting brands, products and people) to improve the newcomers’ welcome experience to Glide community services. Our mission with this project is to find a way to better orient and connect newcomers to Glide with the services they are looking for and to support easier discovery of other services with an improved wayfinding experience.

Sign up by the end-of-day today –before sales close– to use your design superpowers for good. Help create better service experiences with real community impact! 

Our nonprofit partner, Homebridge, has a design problem that is terribly, incredibly unfair: monetizing what they do to support the parts of their mission that will never be profitable. For years, they’ve tackled providing home care for some of the most in-need senior citizens in the Bay Area — the ones with serious mental health issues, living in poverty, with no support system while they are suffering from the sorts of illnesses that makes one dependent on another human being for basic needs. Unlike those of us who simply fear getting older and not being able to take care of ourselves but have some retirement money set aside,  Homebridge serves those seniors who fall off the edge of a traditional supply/demand curve. They don’t have the means to pay for services they desperately need. Our current era is making it ever harder for Homebridge to do the right thing: cuts to public funding, rising senior populations, and historically low levels of community participation make caring for seniors in poverty an even trickier endeavor. But Homebridge is scrappy, mission-driven, and exploring ways to build a for-profit wing of their enterprise that fits within the scope of their mission yet could still help support their core work.

Fortunately, as designers, we love unfair places. As designers, we solve problems. Not just neat ones in nice boxes, but wicked ones and unfair ones.

As designers, we see uneven, unfair circumstances in the world, along with weird value exchanges — and we see opportunity for innovation. For those of us in the corporate world, BarnRaise has been an excellent opportunity to flex those problem-solving mental muscles. Their mission is noble and user-centered. They want to start solving problems in our favorite place: by considering the user-centered case first. With Homebridge’s desire to think about new models of nonprofit funding for senior care, I admit to having a special interest since I understand that the problem we are to tackle isn’t just about money. It has a large component of social exchange. I know, because I’ve benefited from the experience of caring for a senior myself.

In one of life’s meandering paths that led me to being a designer, I worked as the hiring manager at a senior home care agency. There was a particularly hard client to staff (I’ll call her Rose) who was suffering from a severe case of lupus. She didn’t have a lot of money and could only afford a caregiver for an hour and a half each day. Even though it wasn’t my official job, I visited Rose often. I was paid to do it, but It wasn’t something I did for the money. There were much easier ways to earn cash than by feeding and bathing a rather miserable lady who was suffering from lupus. I did it because visiting Rose taught me about compassion and the depths of my ability to care for another human being. The work was the hardest I’ve done, but inexplicably rewarding — a message we hear over and over from Homebridge’s caregivers, too. One day, I was washing Rose’s legs so we could re-bandage a sore. Rose snapped, “Why are you being so gentle? The other people are much rougher when they help me.” It broke my heart, thinking that other caregivers Rose had may really have been only doing it for the money, brusquely completing their tasks as quickly as possible, not tapping into the wellspring of compassion and humanity to be unleashed when taking care of someone who is sick and dying. In this particular value exchange, everyone was getting robbed.

Businesses have entered the era of mashed-up social and monetary exchanges. Can nonprofits do it, too?

One of the big questions I have going into BarnRaise weekend is how might we amplify the role of the social exchange when we are designing a monetary exchange for Homebridge? Modern businesses like AirBnB and Lyft leverage the sharing economy as the centerpiece of their brand identity and the way they deliver value. Staying in a person’s house or getting into a stranger’s car requires trust and the building of a sharing economy where politeness, quality of service, and uniqueness add value on top of having a place to sleep or getting a ride home. How might we use what they are doing to combine the monetary aspect of running a successful business and social aspect of creating a culture that has very little to do with money?

For designers who spend most of our time designing at for-profit companies, what lessons can we learn from Homebridge’s social exchanges, and how human and important it is to care for another human being? What are the consequences of designing models that ignore it?  When we write marginalized user populations out of our business plans, are we missing an opportunity to create a more valuable social exchange? Are we missing opportunities to innovate on our product portfolios as a whole, making them better for everyone? Should we all, like Homebridge, be starting with the human problem instead of the profit model? Can Homebridge’s robust social exchange be used not only to sustain the work of their core mission, but provide quality care and caring for the rest of us?

Join us at BarnRaise to help answer some, if not all, of these questions.
Beth Schwindt, UX Researcher, Capital One. Beth once used her keen skills of observation to win fifth prize in the Meat and Meat Cuts Judging competition at the Dane County, WI Fair — as a vegetarian.

Wall Mural by Brendan Murphy

The Magic of Family House
For this year’s BarnRaise, Sept 9-11, The Capital ONE Design team is partnering with Family House (FH), a local nonprofit that provides free, temporary housing for families with children undergoing cancer and other treatment at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

The first time our team visited Family House, we were immediately struck by the warmth, hospitality, and comfort of our environment. It was clear that the House truly provides a home away from home (vs. a home away from hospital) for the children and families it serves.

As we learned more about the organization, its history, and its vision, we were further struck by the passion of Family House’s staff. Authors sometimes refer to the idea of “the given line” – a word, phrase, or idea that passes through the air and inspires an entire body of work. During our first meeting with FH staff, when Karen Banks, Director of Volunteer Programs, said to us, “There’s Magic at Family House,” we knew we had our given line.

Finding the Bright Spots
Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard stories of pain, sadness, and loss, yes. But we’ve also heard stories about communities coming together everyday to create positive experiences for families. We’ve learned about children running up to the front desk to borrow videos when they’re feeling well enough simply because there’s no time to waste. With its arts & crafts nights, guitar therapy, birthday parties, and more, Family House is by no means a dismal place. It’s a place where stories are told and there are opportunities to laugh. It’s a place where kids get to be kids.

As designers, we seek to understand experiences holistically – including all the highs and lows – but at times we can become focused on problems and challenges rather than strengths. Certainly, one approach of design is to “solve for painpoints,” but another is to “replicate the bright spots.”¹ What would it mean for our team to look at what’s working at Family House in order to help solve what isn’t?

In the theme of “Transitioning into a new chapter of life,” our team is exploring what it’s like to transition into Family House. How might we improve the experiences of families and staff during this deeply stressful and emotional time? In light of everything we’ve learned and with our given line as inspiration, rather than ask ourselves, “How might we solve for X, Y, Z?,” we ask, “How might we amplify the magic at Family House?”

Register now and you could be part of this team.

About Capital ONE Design
ONE Design is Capital One’s internal design organization. It brings humanity, simplicity, and ingenuity to the products and services Capital One offers its customers. ONE Design is focused on impact in 2016: designing experiences that empower customers to better manage their finances.

¹ From Chip & Dan Heath’s Switch

Dianne Que is the Team Liasion for Capital ONE Design and Family House. She is a Design Manager at Adaptive Path @ Capital One and is an alumna of the MBA in Design Strategy program at CCA. When she’s not at work, you can find her at your neighborhood ice cream shop.

Whether you consider yourself a creative, a maker, an ideas person, or are just plain curious, this is the opportunity to work with a local San Francisco community organization, on a tangible opportunity, while being led by experts in the design process.

What is BarnRaise?

BarnRaise is a maker conference that brings together design firms, community organizations, and people interested in designing solutions for the communities in which they live.

Started by the Institute of Design in Chicago, the San Francisco BarnRaise is being organized and hosted by AdaptivePath.org and is a great way to make a difference in our community. Be part of the history in the making!

This year’s theme is transformation:

How might we create experiences that support people who are transitioning into a new chapter of life?

That’s a BIG, TOUGH question.

Here’s one example of how we’re will be using design thinking to solve a big problem and help a San Francisco nonprofit as they transition.

Meet La Cocina & DesignMap

La Cocina is an incubator in the Mission helping food entrepreneurs get their businesses up and running. They provide a mentorship program to teach the owners how to run a business and provide market opportunities and commercial kitchen space.

What makes them truly special is their vision for  diversity in food and culture by supporting women of color and immigrant communities.

A La Cocina entrepreneur’s story:

Meet Guadalupe Guerrero, from Guanajuato. She lived and worked in the city, in other people’s restaurants, for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

For 14 years.

Another La Cocina business owner, Alicia, of Tamales Los Mayas introduced her to La Cocina by saying, “why make someone else’s dream come true, when you can make your own?”

And so, El Pipila, Guadalupe Guerrero’s business and dream, was born.

La Cocina has been helping people like Guadalupe successfully open businesses over the last 10 years–from food trucks, to farmers markets, to packaged food brands–and has opened 22 brick and mortar locations in the Bay Area.

What’s next for La Cocina?

It’s important for nonprofits to have diverse funding so they won’t be as negatively impacted by a decrease in funding from any one particular donor. Experts suggest that the majority of an organization’s funding should be comprised of several individual donors because they are likely to have donated based on a personal connection that, if cultivated properly, will ideally grow versus rather than diminish.”

La Cocina gets creative and holds events that are popular with the community and potential donors. Just last weekend, they hosted La Lucha de La Cocina, a tribute to those who fight for what is important to them, especially all of their talented chefs.

1,800 people attended the festivities, which included a fierce competition for the best tacos, lucha libre wrestling, and cultural dancing from the Mission Cultural Center. 18 of the 20 chefs were program participants or graduates of La Cocina.

Though these events are successful, La Cocina’s big challenge is capturing and retaining donors. Which leads us to our design challenge:

How might we help La Cocina create a membership program to build a sustainable revenue resource as they continue to grow?

DesignMap is here to help!

DesignMap  is a San Francisco based consulting firm that was founded in 1996 and also calls the Mission its home. Having hosted an afternoon to teach students from nearby First Graduate about design and launching a pop-up coffee shop to benefit the local Boys and Girls Club they’re crazy excited to pitch in with another local non-profit.

DesignMap specializes in designing software for their clients. And they know that no software exists in a vacuum: there are people, processes, and organizations that can support success, or sidetrack it. So they work with their clients to find the root of their problems and the breadth of their opportunities, and then partner with them to create solutions beyond just their software needs.

DesignMap will be leading La Cocina and the rest of the team through the design thinking process to determine how to bring this membership program to life.

The best way to learn design thinking? Experience it first-hand!

The BarnRaise is Sept 9th through 11th(registration). In the upcoming weeks our La Cocina + DesignMap team will be conducting research interviews to understand why people do or do not donate. Then, we’ll kick off the weekend with the rest of our team (that could be you!) and start exploring and prototyping ideas to bring La Cocina’s new membership program to life.

In the city but can’t join for the full weekend? Register to join us at the Capital One Café on Sunday afternoon to see all of the design solutions for yourself!

Bonnie Vig, is the team liaison for this team and a Principal Product Designer at Capital One.  She is an introvert who was tricked into attending an improv class where she visualized herself running out the door, but found out she secretly loves it.

I like to think that this is what makes a lot of designers tick: our incessant drive to make a difference and leave the world better than how we found it. As designers, we all do our part. But for many of us, our day-to-day responsibilities keep us from being able to create an impact with real people in our local communities.

BarnRaise is an opportunity to create impact in a way that’s real, personal, and local. BarnRaise brings together design firms, community-based organizations, and participants to address a social topic embedded in the local community. Interdisciplinary groups are formed and each focuses on tackling a unique challenge that a community-based organization is facing.

The BarnRaise model originated at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where I dove head first into my pursuit of design. This year, BarnRaise will be in San Francisco and is being hosted by Adaptive Path.org, which is part of Capital One, where I now work. From dotorg’s inception, one of our main goals was to not only to create opportunities for Capital One designers to partner with community organizations but to also to create similar opportunities for the design community at large. In this way, we could all come together for the greater good. The Institute of Design’s BarnRaise model was the answer. I’m honored to be a part of these purpose-driven communities of designers and I’m eager to see how we will positively have a positive impact in our wider San Francisco community.

The challenge for BarnRaise SF is: How might we create experiences that support people who are transitioning into a new chapter of life? We already have a great group of community-based organizations and design firms participating. Now we’re looking for others to join us: designers, students, non-profit employees, and anyone who shares our passion to change the world for the better!

Jessica Striebich is a Service Experience Designer with Adaptive Path @ Capital One and an alumnus of the Institute of Design.

Jesse James Garrett: First of all, congratulations on the success of the book. It sounds like it has really struck a chord with a lot of people around the world.

Steve Silberman: Yeah, I’m very happy to say that the book seems to have touched people from several different communities in a good place. For autistic people, I think it’s important that many of the ideas – such as the concept of neurodiversity that they first articulated – are rendered here in the larger arc of autism history. From what parents have told me, it’s been really important for them because there’s so much confusing information about autism out there, like is it an epidemic? Can it be cured? By looking at 80-plus years of autism history, I make it clear that the best “cure” for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in supportive parents, accommodating employers, and general changes to society that make it easier for autistic people to function and thrive in a world that’s basically not built for them.

JJG: You touched on the concept of neurodiversity, which is a relatively new idea and a different way of thinking about autism than many people are familiar with, so tell me about neurodiversity and what that word means.

SS: Sure. Well, the word was coined in the late ’90s by a sociology student in Australia named Judy Singer. Judy was a member of an early online network for autistic adults at the time that the diagnosis had become available to adults for the first time. And what the members of this community found was that all of the struggles and challenges they faced in their lives were not caused by their autism. They were caused by a society that either failed to meet their needs or directly stigmatized and bullied them for being autistic.

So she coined the term neurodiversity in the hope that it would spread through the community of people who think differently, for people with conditions like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD as a kind of rallying cry, in the same ways that phrases like black is beautiful or gay is good had spread through other marginalized and stigmatized communities and were very empowering.

JJG: The interesting thing about this to me is the way in which de-pathologizing the natural way that these people’s minds work helps to reframe the potential value of different ways of thinking for all of us.

SS: I think that’s definitely true. De-pathologizing is not just a question of being nice, either, because a consistent problem with autism research over the years is that neuroscientists will look at brains of people with autism and if they find any variations from what they’ve described as the norm, then those become deficits. But not every variation in brain structure or function is a deficit, and just because the brains of autistic people do it doesn’t mean that it’s a problem. And scientifically, very often in studies of autistic brains, the variations they’re describing are well within the normal range. So it’s actually better science not to automatically pathologize a group of people because it helps you look at your data in a more unbiased way.

JJG: This notion of building a better world for autistic people is where the work that we do as user experience designers really comes into play. What are some of the successes that you have seen in reshaping the way that the world works to better accommodate people who are not in the middle of the bell curve in terms of their neurological patterns?

SS: A very recent success story from this month is the popularity of Pokemon Go among autistic kids, and this is still anecdotal, but parents are reporting that their kids have become more socially engaged and more active in the outdoors. Being in the outdoors can sometimes be a very overwhelming experience for autistic kids, in part because both the kids and the families often get bullied or the parents get looked at askance in the supermarket. But Pokemon Go seems to be encouraging autistic kids, who often have a curious affinity for technology and interfaces, toward just getting outside and being more physically active.

But the important point is that making technology accessible results in better technology for everyone. It’s actually really baked into the history of technology. For instance, in the early ’80s, two teachers named Jackie and Steve Brand started working with Apple. They had a daughter named Shoshana who was profoundly disabled. She was nearly blind, unable to speak. She had cerebral palsy, but her parents, Jackie and Steve, were not willing to give up on her. So they met a guy who helped set them up with a keyboard that could interface with an Apple II, and then they programmed the keyboard so that it would respond with positive feedback no matter what area of the keyboard Shoshana pressed. That functioned as a reward, and the effect on Shoshana was absolutely transformative.

In fact, her mother said something that I’m going to read to you verbatim, because it should resonate through the entire high tech industry. It’s a very earnest testimony of the power of accessible technology for disabled people of any age really.

“Imagine the whole creative process opening up before you where there has never been an outlet before. Imagine suddenly being able to express your needs, your desires, when you’ve never spoken or written a word. This is a drama that makes chills go up your spine. All of a sudden ‘She can’t do this,’ became, ‘Wait a minute. We haven’t found the tool to help her do this yet.’”

JJG: If I were a designer getting ready to start a new project and I wanted to incorporate thinking about neurodiversity into what I’m doing, what are some of the considerations that come into play?

SS: As an autistic person once told me, autistic people are more different from each other than non-autistic people are, in that autistic people have a very wide range of needs, skills, and attributes. Some autistic people can’t talk at all without assistance. Other autistic people are very chatty. Some autistic people seek intense sensory stimulation. Other autistic people are very overwhelmed by sensory stimulation. So there’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for people on the spectrum. But what you can do is create highly customizable interfaces, so that users can adapt the interface to meet their particular set of needs.

One of the most effective ways to have these designs reflect those different needs is to have autistic people on your development team so that they can tell you what they need or what other people that share the same label might need. It’s important to encourage diversity at the hiring level in high tech, because you get different sets of eyes with different ways of thinking behind them looking at your product, then as you make the product more accessible you make it more intuitive and more valuable for everyone.

JJG: I think one of the challenges in bringing autistic people into the development process is just trying to figure out how to work together effectively. These teams are often trying to move very quickly and are accustomed to certain styles of communication and certain styles of collaboration. Are there ways you have seen organizations be really effective in incorporating this broader range of thinking styles into the work that they do?

SS: Sure. One of the historical developments of recent decades is that even so-called neuro-typical employees are used to collaborating digitally. Most autistic people have real challenges processing multiple channels of input in social interactions, in real time, so for example, looking the person in the eye while understanding what they’re saying, while exhibiting the right body language – that is really difficult for most autistic people no matter where they are on the spectrum. But online communication and digital collaboration are the great levelers in that regard.

There was a trend for a while in Silicon Valley companies to do open plan offices but that doesn’t work for everyone. It often doesn’t work for autistic people. It doesn’t work for people with ADHD because they can get easily distracted. It doesn’t even work for garden-variety introverts who prefer to work in a quiet office. So providing a diverse range of working environments is better for everyone, better for people with lots of labels, like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD, but it’s also just better for the wide range of people who get to call themselves normal. You end up with a more diverse and resilient workforce, because a workforce that contains people that have different kinds of minds can see problems from a multiplicity of angles.

JJG: And I think it’s that multiplicity of angles on the problem that is the really exciting opportunity for us as creative professionals to be able to imagine possibilities that we might not otherwise see.

SS: Exactly. It’s nice to think of that only in positive terms, like thinking outside of the box and coming up with innovative solutions, but it can also prevent disastrous problems. There was a catastrophe in a hotel where the engineers created this visually very impressive walkway above the lobby, but when [UX Week 2009 keynote speaker] Temple Grandin, who is not only one of the leading industrial designers in her field, but one of the first autistic adults to publicly identify that way, to come out of the closet as it were, looked at it. She immediately saw that the design of the catwalk would not have been able to support the weight of the number of people who were expected to walk on it. So you can also not only think out of the box and come up with innovative solutions but you can also prevent disaster.

JJG: Wow. So where do you see all of this going? What do you think is the future of neurodiversity in design, and in the workplace? How do you see organizations evolving to address this?

SS: I see the core message at the heart of inclusion and accommodation in education and employment as giving everyone what they need to maximize their chances of success. For example, there’s a funny thing about accommodations for disabled people. They tend to have benevolent effects that radiate outward towards society, and I don’t have to be very theoretical about this at all.

Think about curb cuts in the sidewalks. Yes, they help wheelchair users get around. In a world in which there are no wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, or accessible bathrooms, being in a wheelchair is very disabling. If you make those accommodations, it’s not at all. People can go anywhere. Yet every parent who has ever pushed a stroller down a sidewalk was very grateful for the curb cut because they didn’t have to bump the baby.

Particularly in the case of autism and other cognitive disabilities, that is not the way we’ve handled it as a society. It’s as if we’ve been saying, “Who cares about wheelchair ramps and accessible classrooms. Someday science will enable everyone to walk.” We should look at it in a very practical sense, about what changes we can make in workplaces and to interfaces so that more people can participate in moving society forward.

JJG: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Steve. We look forward to hearing your talk at UX Week 2016.

SS: Awesome. Thank you so much.

To hear Steve deliver his talk at our upcoming UX Week 2016 in San Francisco, register here.

IN: You gave one overriding principle that would steer sextech towards something that supports human interaction: gender equality. Are there any other supporting design principles or criteria that you think sextech requires in order to support that humanity?

CG: No, it literally is that simple. Diversity drives innovation. True innovation, true disruption is the result of many different mindsets, perspectives, insights, backgrounds, experiences, worldviews all coming together in constructive, creative conflict to get to a better place none of us could have gotten to on our own.

Everything else becomes possible when you have diversity. I mean not only gender diversity; I also mean diversity of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age. When you have many, many different perspectives coming together, you get to extraordinary things together. And really, all other issues fall away, because then you have the full spectrum of humanity inputting into things that will create better lives for the full spectrum of humanity.

IN: Well, that is a great call to action. Do you have any other words for us?

CG: Thank you. I’m thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to talk about this at UX Week. I’m really looking forward to having the audience bring to my talk all of their own experiences with sex and their sexuality. This is about all of us learning together and inputting together to design a better future for all of us in the one area of universal human experience, the one universal human use case that is still a no-go area for so much of society, business, and tech.

One of the things that I campaign for is a more open, honest, authentic approach to sex in every area of popular culture. My industry, advertising, is missing out on huge opportunities when they refuse to add this area to the consumer insight and human psychology that is the foundation of all the work that we do.

At the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, I said that because we don’t talk about sex, we don’t understand how much it could be informing every single area of product, brand, marketing. So I gave examples: people have sex in cars. An awful lot of people have an awful lot of sex in cars—particularly in countries and societies and culture where young people live at home for a very long time, where sex outside marriage is frowned upon. The car is the haven, the refuge for people who are unable to have sex indoors. Automotive manufacturers are spectacularly failing to design for this, and they’re also spectacularly failing to incorporate it into the marketing of cars.

At an even more fundamental level, people have sex in bed. All over the world, everywhere, people have sex in bed—yet mattress manufacturers only ever spend money on R&D and talk about technology and design that is all about giving you a good night’s sleep on their mattress. Nobody is focusing their mattress R&D and their design and technology on coming up with the mattress of the future that is the most fantastic mattress to have sex on. People have sex on kitchen counters. The kitchen industry is failing to leverage that fact.

This impacts everything and therefore provides opportunity for everything in a way that our entire society and business world is failing to see. And I’m really trying to open up everybody’s mind to that.

The irony is that everybody is dying to talk about sex. Our biggest obstacle of building MakeLoveNotPorn and then specifically raising funding is a social dynamic that I call fear of what other people think. It’s never about what the person I’m talking to thinks. When you understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, no one can argue with it, the business case is clear. It is always their fear of what they think other people will think, which operates around sex more than any other area. And I always want to say that everyone else is thinking just the same.

People are dying to talk about sex. This is the appeal of MakeLoveNotPorn. It has everything to do with the fact that everybody wants to know what everybody else is really doing in bed, and nobody does. And now, at MakeLoveNotPorn, for the first time, we’re showing them—real world sex shared socially.

IN: It amazes me that so many people are willing to record and publicly share themselves having real sex. I’m aware of the policies you have for MLNP that make it safer and more comfortable for people to share their videos with the site—you’ve made it as safe as you can for people to share their videos online, but it still seems terrifying and unimaginable to me.

CG: We spent years concepting and designing MakeLoveNotPorn.tv because we knew that if we were going to invite people to do something they’ve never done before, socially share their real world sex, we had to think through every possible ramification of that in order to design a completely safe and trustworthy space. We operate unlike anybody else in the adult sphere, and in fact, in terms of the measures we put in place, we operate unlike anybody else on the Internet.

Before we launched, we obviously had to seed the platform with content before we could put it out there. I and my community manager and curator Sarah spent a year asking our entire network—and complete strangers—if they’d be willing to film themselves having real world sex for us.

Every time I would have a conversation about MakeLoveNotPorn, I would always end it by asking the person I was talking to, “So, would you be interested in contributing content?” I would always ask this question regardless of whether I personally thought the person I was talking to would or wouldn’t. I have to tell you that 99.9 percent of the time the answer was yes, to the extent that I literally had to force my facial features to stay immobile, because I would go, “What?”

We discovered the desire to do this lies a lot closer to the surface in many more people than you would’ve ever thought, and given the reason, given our social mission and our social values, people jump at the chance. Here’s the thing that was really revelatory to us: we’re a social experiment. We’re putting this platform out there. We have no idea what’s gonna come back. We don’t dictate what real world sex is. You are the world, show us.

We’re learning all the time. The thing that we were riveted to learn is that sharing your real world sex on MakeLoveNotPorn is as transformative for you and your relationships as socially sharing other things are, for humanity at large. We’re all-inclusive and we have lots of solo MakeLoveNotPorn stars—male and female masturbation videos. Very few MakeLoveNotPorn stars have ever even filmed themselves having sex before. They’re doing it for us because we gave them permission.

The men and women who film themselves masturbating have never done this before, and they tell us doing that made them love themselves more. It enhanced their sexual self-esteem, their sexual sense of self. The couples who film themselves having sex tell us it was transformative for their relationship. Because when you decide to film yourself having sex, you have to talk about it. And when you talk about it, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been together, the conversation can go places it’s never gone before in your relationship. People write to us and say, “Doing this took our relationship to a whole new level.” We started a section on our blog where our MakeLoveNotPorn stars guest post about their individual experiences of why they did this and what it’s done for them and their relationships subsequently. It’s absolutely fascinating.

IN: That is fascinating. Thank you very much for speaking with us. It was a real pleasure.

Cindy will be giving a keynote at UX Week 2016 (August 9-12) entitled “Redesigning The Future Of Sex Through Sextech” in San Francisco. Register here to hear the talk. If you missed it, read the first part of our conversation with her here.

Iran Narges: How do you define sextech?

Cindy Gallop: Essentially, sextech is any technology or tech-driven desire to amplify or improve the quality of human sexual experience.

As a society, we are all remarkably mixed up about sex. Our reluctance to talk about sex openly and honestly, and the shame and embarrassment we feel around it, has many implications. For example, because the media and tech blogs are just as uncomfortable covering sex as anyone else is talking about it, when they do talk about sextech, they tend to default to the hardware side of sextech. And so you’ll see all the coverage in the media about teledildonics, VR porn, sex robots.

The issue with that is all of the awareness and coverage goes to that side of sextech when there are many more interesting things happening on the side I call software, which is where my own startup, MakeLoveNotPorn, operates. The software side is technology that is designed to bring people closer together in the real world. The reason that the media are not comfortable covering that side of things is because it involves people actually having sex with each other.

The irony is that when you default to the hardware, what you are doing is placing all of the emphasis and focus on sextech on those aspects of it designed to drive each of us further and further apart from each other into our own little isolating virtual world, and I am all about the software side of sextech that brings us closer together in the real world.

IN: You’ll be speaking to an audience made up mostly of designers; more from the UX side of design, but it does tend to be a pretty general, broad design audience. What do you want this audience specifically to know about sextech?

CG: There is a huge amount explored and discussed and talked about with regard to the user experience in every other aspect of tech and in design generally, but not when it comes to the user experience in this most sensitive of all areas. We had a fascinating task when it came to designing MakeLoveNotPorn, particularly because we are a whole new category on the Internet that doesn’t currently exist—social sex. Our competition on MakeLoveNotPorn is not porn, it’s Facebook and YouTube—or it would be, if Facebook and YouTube allowed sexual self-expression, self-identification. We have a platform that is all about socializing sex, and that has very interesting ramifications for the user experience and therefore the UX design that nobody else has engaged in the way that we did.

There is a very standard design default that happens when it comes to sex. Again, this is symptomatic of society’s reluctance to open up to and explore sex in creative and interesting ways, and equally in interesting ways when it comes to design. When we were looking for designers to work with, I said to my co-founder, Oonie Chase (who is our UX lead), “I don’t want to see any portfolios where the word sex instantly conjures up the same kind of iconography that we regrettably see all too often in media pieces covering us”: the default of red lips, red stilettos, women in lingerie. We are so limited in our instant sort of cliché-dom when it comes to sex because we are so reluctant to explore it.

I was looking for a truly innovative approach to bringing something that normally is forced to stay in the shadows out into the open. Our entire design process with MakeLoveNotPorn was about getting away from all the clichés. So, for example, very early on, Oonie said, “You know, everything to do with sex online is dark. People use a lot of black. We’re going to be white. We’re going to do the exact opposite, we’re going to be out in the open, we’re gonna bring light to this, we’re going to open this up, we’re going to be healthy and natural—you know, everyone else is dark, we’re gonna be white.” Even something as basic as that is a revolution in this area.

I want to talk about the design and other areas like the semantic approach, the tagging approach that we took to socializing something that people are not used to talking about and being open about and using openly at all.

IN: I have a question following up on that. The human-centered design process is anchored by insight into human needs, human behaviors, emotions. We typically start with deep, qualitative research to uncover those needs.

I’m familiar with how MakeLoveNotPorn came into being through your own talks and writing online. That came out of a need that you personally identified through your own qualitative research. What other deep human needs do you feel are currently going unmet that could be addressed by sextech?

CG: MakeLoveNotPorn came out of direct personal experience. It began as MakeLoveNotPorn.com, a very clunky little side venture that, after my talk at TED went viral, exploded in a way that I had never anticipated. The reason I then took it forward to MakeLoveNotPorn.tv was because of e-mails to my MakeLoveNotPorn inbox that come from everybody—young and old, male and female, straight and gay, every single country in the world. Even before the site, what amazed people was the fact that I stood on a stage in public, I talked about and I’m doing something about what everybody knows and no one ever speaks about. As a result, people feel able to tell me anything. They pour their hearts out to me in e-mail; they tell me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they’ve never told anyone else before. They write to me for advice: 15-year-old boys write, 50-year-old women write.

We hear from our community every day and all of that input is utterly factored into everything we do. This is one of the reasons why it’s so frustrating that we find it challenging to raise funding. Everything we are building and want to build we are being asked for on a daily basis by our community. This is not if and when stuff. In the broader sextech community, it is no coincidence that the most interesting and innovative ventures in sextech today are coming from female founders. Women are owning their sexuality in a way that we have never really been afforded the opportunity to do, as much as we are today in the world we live in.

I define sextech very broadly in two categories. I call the first “standouts”. By that I mean people and companies and technologies that are doing what already exists, but doing it better. In that area, I would class sex toy manufacturers like Jimmyjane and LELO who are doing an extraordinary job redesigning sex toys, but are enhancing things that already exist. The other side is what I call outliers, and those are the innovators and disruptors. I would obviously class MakeLoveNotPorn, introducing the area of social sex there, but women are coming up with really disruptive approaches for sextech that are fascinating.

For example, I posted the work of a Royal College of Art graduate called Wan Tseng, who has designed completely new kinds of sex toys. Sex toys, generally speaking, are viewed as instruments to get you off. The focus for sex toys, whether male, female, cross-gender, whatever, is to achieve orgasm. Wan Tseng has designed a fabulous range of wearables which are pads and beautiful objects you wear on your body that are designed to replicate very light touches, breath on skin. It’s a whole different kind of sensory, sensual, sexual experience that is not geared purely at focusing on the genitals and getting off. I find that absolutely fascinating.

IN: You’ve touched on a lot of the themes that I want to ask you about, but there’s one conflicting pair of ideas that’s coming up for me as I hear this.

You are such an advocate for human and real sexuality—I identify your perspective as being fundamentally humanist. But when I think about technology and sex, we already have this very compelling, addictive technology. People are already finding that their social interactions are compromised by their addiction to their mobile phones. We are about to get hit by a wave of immersive and innovative experiences through virtual and augmented reality. When you throw in AI and machine learning, we are looking at a future of virtual sexual experiences that may be more compelling for some people than other human beings.

How do you think that designers should navigate that? What are the experience principles that designers should use to keep these experiences human? How can we steer sextech away from a relationship-disrupting model and towards one that supports human interaction?

CG: There is only one thing you need to do to guarantee that outcome, and it’s the one thing that you need to do in every single area of business and life in the world today. That one principle is to have gender-equal leaders, founders, designers, teams, executors, funders, supporters, and champions around every single venture in this area.

I’m a feminist, I’m a rampant feminist, so I champion gender equality in all areas of business and in all areas of tech. At the moment, in Silicon Valley, there is a huge bias in favor of funding male founders. When you have tech ventures at scale that are founded by an all-male founding team, designed and built by all male designers and developers, funded by all male venture capitalists, and therefore have an all-male advisory board—you get ventures with a male-centric worldview.

This worldview then embeds itself in popular culture in a very fundamental way.

I wish society understood the opposite of what it thinks is true. Women enjoy sex just as much as men, and men are just as romantic as women. I have many 20-something men friends who are dying to find romance and find it just as difficult as women do. When you have a world that is equally informed, influenced, designed, managed, led, and driven by women just as much as men, you have world in which men are far happier, just as women will be, too. Just one key principle—gender-equal everything in the design world—leads to the humanity-focused, humanity-driven, humanity-celebrating, vastly improved world that all of us would like to see.

The world I want to see is one where we bring people closer together in the real world. MakeLoveNotPorn is a tech platform designed to improve communication around sex, to get to better sex, get to better relationships, get to better lives. As long as I and my fellow female founders trying to do the same things do not get funded, as long as our tech platforms don’t get to scale in the way that Tinder does, we’re going down a very specific route, and it’s not going to make mankind happy. It’s not going to make womankind happy, either, by the way.

Cindy will be giving a keynote at UX Week 2016 (August 9-12) entitled “Redesigning The Future Of Sex Through Sextech” in San Francisco. Register here to hear the talk, and keep an eye out for part two of our interview with her.

To read Pt. 2 of this interview, go here.