 When I was seven years old, I met a blind man. I had just gotten this new backpack and I was red and I was super proud of this backpack. And I told him, do you see my backpack? It's so awesome. And he said, I'm sure it's really nice. And my dad was there and I look at my dad and I'm like, what? I don't understand. What do you see mean? I'm sure it looks nice. And my dad said, well, he's blind. You can't see anything. And my immediate response was, oh, but then he can't see colors. That's so sad. And my dad said, you know what? I don't think he feels that way. You can't know what it's like to be blind because you can see. Just like you can't know what it's like to be me because you're you. My name, like he said, is Morten Rand Hendrickson. And today I want to talk to you about empathy and acceptance in design and community. Now, that sounds like a really weird topic. So let me give you a framework so you understand what this is all about. Over the last seven years, I've done a lot of teaching about WordPress. I've talked to a lot of people in the WordPress community. And in that entire time, I used to start any conversation I had with someone who's not seen WordPress before by saying the thing we all say all the time. WordPress is easy. This is how we sell WordPress, right? It's easy. You install it. It takes five minutes. You can put up your blog. You can democratize publishing. Everything is awesome. And I believe that because when I started using WordPress 10 years ago, it was easy. Well, relatively speaking, it was easy compared to anything else. But then I started doing user research. I talked to actual people who use WordPress. And the responses I got were surprising. I don't understand how to do this. It's a very common response. I'm reading the instructions, but I can't get it to work. Also a very common response. And the one that really struck me, oh my god, I feel so stupid. Now, when you see these by themselves, you think, well, this is someone who hasn't taken enough time to learn this stuff, or maybe they're completely new. But if you put it into a context of a conversation, you realize why this is the problem. I say WordPress is easy. They say I don't understand. I say, but I think WordPress is easy. And they say, I'm reading the instructions, but I can't get it to work. Well, when I learned WordPress, it was easy. Oh my god, I feel so stupid. You've all heard this, right? Don't judge a man until you walk the mile in his shoes. This is pretty much how we live our lives. We try to understand other people's perspectives before we judge them. The problem is sometimes the miles we walk take different paths. So even though we're walking in the same shoes, we might not have the same experience. WordPress used to be easy, but because I've worked with WordPress for 10 years, I don't know if it's still easy to learn. I can't know if it's still easy to learn because I already know it. This is empathy. It's this feeling that you can understand and share someone else's experience and their emotions. In our community today, we talk about empathy all the time. If you go to any blog about web design, everyone's talking about community. You go to any event. There's an empathy talk. There's an empathy talk here right now. We talk about empathy all the time. Google is talking about putting empathy into their designs. We're even talking about teaching computers about empathy so that they can act better. And if we don't put empathy into our applications, huge problems arise. But empathy is really weird. Reason study shows that people actually have empathy for robots in pain. This is Atlas. Atlas really wants to pick up this box. This is Atlas's not-so-kind friend. Now, as you watch this, Atlas really wants to pick up the box when this other guy is like, no, it's just not happening at all. Watching this, you start to feel something. It's really frustrating to watch. Come on, come on. OK, I'm going to go over here and pick up the box. This is a frustrating video. I watch it again and again, and I'm like, jeez. Oh, is it going to get it? Yay. Oh, thanks. Empathy is part of this automatic response system we have built in. It's actually the second part of a chain. We start with sympathy. You feel for someone. Then you have empathy. You feel with that person. And you may have compassion. You feel compelled to actually do something to help them. And a lot of the things we do in everyday life is powered by this one, empathy. Now, like everything else that matters in the world, empathy is complicated. If we do empathy right in design, we can create amazing things. When pharmacists discover that people are having a really hard time taking the right pills at the right time every day, they come up with this idea of pill packs, a little pack that contains all the pills you need that tells people when, what, how, and everything else. No more mistakes. This is designed by empathy. When scientists looked at people with Parkinson's disease or other type of movement disorders and discovered that they were having a really hard time eating, they took the technology from camera stabilizers and put them into spoons so that they could eat themselves. Because these people don't want to stop eating or have someone else feed them. They want to preserve agency. And if we can use technology to get that, then we should. But empathy is also super complicated. If you have too much empathy for someone or you have misplaced empathy for something, you might end up making really bad judgments and pass judgments onto people that are not justified. A lot of the challenges we face in our community today, I think, are actually caused by uncritical use of empathy. The web is like this amazing thing that builds bridges where there were no bridges before. But at the same time, it creates these massive chasms that just keep expanding and expanding and pushes people further and further apart. It's because empathy assumes a shared context. But today, a lot of that shared context is gone. We used to live in small communities where the farthest you could ever reach was how far you could travel by foot or by horseback or something. But today, if you put something on the internet, you can reach anywhere on the entire planet. And you don't know anything about the people who are reading it. So you can't make any assumptions about them. And when you see people fight online, it's usually because they don't share any context. So they're not understanding each other at all. They're not even speaking the same language. They might share English, but they're not understanding what they're saying. So we need an upgrade to empathy. Seven years ago, I discovered one of my friends was colorblind. He's a photographer, and he showed me this picture I was really proud of, and the colors were totally messed up. And I'm like, is this some sort of art project? And he's like, no, it looks great, right? And I'm like, no, every color is totally messed up. And he had no idea what I was talking about. And then I started thinking, okay, so you've never seen red and green, but you see something. So there's a color that doesn't have a name that you're observing that I can't see. So when I see red, you see this other color. And when I see green, you see this other color. So you're actually living in an alternate reality where red and green doesn't exist, but this other color that I can't see exists. But how do I know that that's reality? How can, is it possible that maybe what I'm seeing is wrong? I can't actually judge that. And then John's nose like, you know nothing. Stop it. See, empathy is this projection of our experience onto other people. And we assume they're the same. Play along with me. If you are a sighted person, imagine for a moment being blind. What immediately happens is you start thinking about all the things you can't do. And you think about the loss of vision. Well, this is Carol. She's a friend of mine. She is blind and she's a photographer. She takes amazing photos. You wouldn't think that's possible with a blind person? It is. This is Justin Salas. He's the son of Trisha Salas, who's in the WordPress accessibility team. He is blind and a rock climber and a professional photographer. So the ideas we have about being blind are completely wrong if you talk to blind people. Think about being deaf. Suddenly loss of hearing. What you think about is the only thing you can no longer do. This is Nal de Marco, the winner of ABC's Dancing with the Stars. He is profoundly deaf. You cannot hear the music, but he can dance. You wouldn't think people can dance when they're deaf, but they can. For the last 10 years, my wife and I have been dancing. And that's not my wife. That's my dance teacher. My wife is hiding behind the camera. As she always does, she's sitting right over there. So I've been dancing for 10 years and I know a lot of steps. I know how to lead my partner into a lot of steps. I know what my partners supposed to be doing. And when I dance with people who have just started, I feel this tremendous sense of empathy. I understand what they're going through, right? But the thing is, I actually don't. I know what it's like to learn how to dance from a leader's perspective, but I have no understanding of what it's like to learn how to dance from a follower's perspective because I've never done it. And that became abundantly clear one day when our dance instructor decided to try to lead me through the steps I already know and it was just a total disaster. I wish I had a video of it. It was basically me stumbling around and stepping on her constantly. So my empathy for my partners was completely misplaced. As she told me when I started talking about this, she said, well, you know, Ginger Rogers, the famous dancer, there's a saying that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and heels. And then you add to that, and being paid less and sexism and all these other things. So her experience is profoundly different from his and you can't really identify with that unless you are that person. So empathy is not so much the feeling you understand and that you understand and share all the people's emotions. It's actually the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it. That's not my definition, by the way. Empathy is seeing someone have an experience and then thinking that you know what they experience. It's our interpretation of the world through a distorted lens of privilege and heightened bias. When there's major disasters in the world, the places, the communities often get hit by what's known as the second disaster, which is people who very empathetically send them tons of stuff. They're like, they need clothes, they need shampoo, they need all these things. The problem is they can't handle that stuff. So they end up spending all their money managing the stuff instead of rebuilding their communities. Empathy is our interpretation of the world through the distorting lens of privilege and bias. This is used as an example of great accessibility. It's a staircase in Vancouver where I live. When you look at it, you're like, well, that is great accessibility. It's a staircase and it has ramp built in, awesome. But anyone who actually needs a ramp will tell you this is a terrible ramp. It doesn't work at all. It's way too steep, the turns are too sharp. There are no railings. It doesn't work. This is not good accessibility. It just looks like good accessibility for someone who doesn't need accessibility. Empathy is our interpretation of the world through the distorting lens of privilege and bias. When you signed up for this conference, you agreed to a code of conduct. Code of conducts are tremendously important in the tech community because we need to make sure that everyone feels welcome and safe in that environment. Yet in the tech community, there's a massive uprising against codes of conduct because people feel like they're somehow infringing on the right to free speech. The problem is, the people who feel that, the people who feel comfortable at conferences that don't have any challenges, that's not the people the code of conduct is for. It's for the people that come to a conference and are deathly afraid of being marginalized. When you say that a code of conduct is not necessary, you are talking from a position of privilege and bias. When we talk about stuffing JavaScript into everything, JavaScript, all the things, we are considering the small minority who can have JavaScript on everything and for whom JavaScript just works. This is a position we have of privilege and bias. Empathy projects our own experience onto other people assuming they're the same. What we need instead is informed empathy and a fair bit of acceptance. So instead of walking in someone else's shoes, we should join them and walk that mile together. So here is my how-to guide to empathy and acceptance and design and community. First of all, empathy on its own is not a solution. It's the starting point of a larger exploration. What we do is reframe, relive, remind, and accept other people's experience. First, reframe. Explore the current context of your partner to see if you actually share the context. And if not, reframe the experience so that you have an equivalent experience that you can compare it to. Studies show that when people, instead of saying, I don't know what you're experiencing, so I don't understand it, try to imagine what it would be like in a similar situation if they were exposed to the same thing. They have a much better chance of understanding the emotional toll of being someone else. In our community, it's as simple as thinking about analogs. If you're designing for a person that doesn't have arms or have a missing arm, think about the time you sprained your wrist. If you're designing for dyslexia, think about how hard it is to read subtitles or try to read the stuff that's up there on the top of the screen while I'm talking. Find analog experiences. Reframe through association. Explore existing contexts. Establish shared and analog context. Imagine or recall similar experiences. Reframe the situation in a familiar context and picture yourself not just standing in people's shoes but having walked a lifetime in them. If you wanna learn more about this, you should check out Microsoft's Inclusive Design Toolkit. It's free, you can just download it. You should also go to the talk that's happening directly after this one in another room about assistive devices. I think that would be quite interesting. The next step is reliving. Create situations or environments where you can relive a similar experience, to physically walk a mile in someone else's shoes. This is Agnes. It's the age gain now empathy suit that allows young people to experience what it's like to be old. It restricts your emotions and allows you to understand what it's like to actually live as an old person. There's also a pregnancy empathy suit for men because men can't have babies. And you can also take it extremely literally. Last month, a woman from Canada posted this picture. It's of her friend's feet. This friend was forced to wear high heels for an entire shift and her feet started to bleed and she was told she couldn't take her shoes off. So the Swedish contractor Emil Andersson bought some shoes and went to work building a house. Now, if you want to brush up on advanced Swedish profanity, I highly recommend watching this video. It's, but see, it's funny, right? Except if you are a woman and you work in a cafe or restaurant in North America, this is what you have to do every day. And if you don't, you get docked in pay. To relive through immersion, spend a week working on your computer without a mouse or trackpad, just the keyboard. Unplug your monitor and spend an entire day working without seeing anything on the screen. Use an old smartphone, switch operating systems. And if you really want to delve into social issues and try to understand the perspective of another person, try looking at some of the really controversial issues on Twitter, like yes, old women or maybe it doesn't hit you or Black Lives Matter, one of those really intense things, just to experience what it's like for other people to live in the world. And the final step, which is maybe the hardest to do, get some friends together and read hateful internet comments to each other. Nothing brings the, it's just words discussion into more perspective than having someone read your words back to you. The third are, remind. Remind yourself of your privilege and bias. By documenting your experience learning something new. This is a lot of fun, but it can also be very enlightening. Cheryl Sandberg was quite criticized for her book, Lean In, because people were saying she didn't fully understand the experience of single moms. Then her husband died. And suddenly she was a single mom. And on Mother's Day this year, she posted on Facebook, I will never experience and understand all of the challenges most single moms face, but I understand a lot more than I did a year ago. When you immerse yourself in an actual experience, everything changes. Two weeks ago, my wife and I got very, very ill. We got like respiratory problems. It was horrible. I couldn't breathe properly, we couldn't sleep. And suddenly I had a whole new appreciation for what it's like to not have your full faculties all the time. Of course, the second I was well, I forgot all about it. But actually reminding yourself of your privilege, I'm healthy, I'm a man, I come from Northern Europe, I'm blonde, all these things have an impact on how I experience the world. And not everyone shares my experience. I have to remind myself that that's not the normal experience. Try to learn an unfamiliar programming language to learn how it is to learn a new language. Begin quilting or knitting or painting or pretty much anything else. Take ballroom dancing classes to challenge yourself. Try your hand at teaching to actually formalize the stuff that you know into something that's meaningful. Document your success and failures so you can always refer back to it. So anytime you meet someone who says it's really hard to learn these new things, you can say, well, I recently learned something new and I know what you're talking about. I know how challenging it is to learn new things. To learn more about this, go check out this book, Design for Real Life. Just buy it and read it. It's 100 pages. There's no excuse. Just do it. The final step, except this is the hardest one, seek out and listen to the disclosure of other people and treat them as true descriptions of the world. When, what's his name? Michael Hoffman posted this tweet. He got a massive response. The reason is he says, how do you make a programmer run away screaming? Show her this. And the response was, a ton of men saying, her, what's up? And then a ton of women said, finally. And within that response, you realize there's a huge problem in our community. We see certain positions as certain gender, which is just absurd. And he said, using she or her to refer to software engineers doesn't come naturally to me, which is exactly why I try to do it. Because someday when my three-year-old daughter pictures a programmer, she sees someone who looks like her. To accept the reality of others, listen to other people without interruption, accept their disclosure as the truth. Question your immediate response to it, seek common ground and expand your horizons of understanding. If you do this right, you can design amazing things. These are greeting cards for people with terminal illnesses that try to answer these questions we all have. Like, how do you tell someone you love them when they're in this horrible state? I'm really sorry I haven't been in touch. I didn't know what to say. Please let me be the first to punch the next person who tells you everything happens for a reason. Together, we can find a cure for the phrase, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Remember, on the web and in WordPress, we the people at this conference are the 1%. We don't represent anyone in the actual WordPress community. We only represent the top 1%. And only by reframing, reliving, reminding, and accepting other people's experience can we have moved forward. Seven months ago, a new life started living inside my wife. Nowhere has this ever... Yes. It was a tremendous amount of work on my part. No time before has it ever become more obvious to me that I cannot share in the experience of someone else. Yesterday, she was sitting in the couch next to me and she goes, oh! And then she took my hand and she put it on her belly. And I felt the baby move, which is amazing. And at the same time, it's an experience that I can never have, just because I'm me. It can never happen. Technology has now gone to the point where you can experience sort of what that's like, just to get immersed in the experience and be able to share it in some way. But at the end, all I can do is say, I'm here, I'm listening, let's walk this mile together. Thank you very much.