The Birth of a Very Serious Mission
Gettin’ Real IRL | Injecting each week with a dose of design delights & insights…
Technology makes things convenient for all of us… but for some, it makes things possible.
Communicating with her deaf uncle exposed Erica to accessible experiences in real life.
Some of the most iconic design outcomes have been the most heavily constrained. In Architecture there’s a theoretical approach known as Universal Design (UD) which recognizes that when operating within heavily constrained bounds, designers can — perhaps unexpectedly — find the freedom to manifest utility in its purest and simplest forms, often born of the most imaginative anti-establishment thinking.
We’ve all experienced UD time and again and seen it work for the greater good — curb cuts, escalators, stabilizing and grippy kitchen utensils, the iPhone, and laws stipulating accessibility of digital utilities like government services, banking, and healthcare – but what about other things many of us consider “utilities”? Couldn’t e-mail, grocery shopping, audio and video education platforms, and calendar apps be considered utilities, too? Where do we draw the line? Do we draw a line? Or can we just agree, finally, that digital experiences of all kinds should generally be accessible to everyone?
While User Experience design — designing for a particular target or set of users — is a good goal, Erica takes it a step further. Universal Design for the greater good is an recurring theme underlying much of the work from Serious Mission.
A BRIEF-ish HISTORY
Growing up, Erica’s BEST friend was her uncle Greg — he was incredible in so many ways and taught her to appreciate more in her first decade of life than lots of folks learn to appreciate in a lifetime. He was brilliant — he taught her how to be a good student, and the nerdy thrill of being one of the smartest people in the room; geeky — in the early 80s he taught Erica to love emerging tech — they had two paper grocery bags full of Atari cartridges, and played with computers from the time they became available on the mass market. Erica wrote all her papers using DOS word processing, and dabbled in pc gaming before that was even a thing (YOOO whut uuuup Galactic Conquest (ref 2); artistic — he taught Erica to love hand-craft and technical skill: painting and drawing as a form of beautiful, exploratory and unique expression; athletic — he taught Erica to play tennis and swim like a fish because it was fun and felt good to push themselves physically; and empathetic — to a degree that few peers would experience in their lives: communicating with one another through a combination of lip reading, sign language, writing, and using assistive technologies like TTY Relay. Greg, who was deaf from birth, taught Erica the importance of empathy: putting herself in someone else’s shoes, and really striving to communicate well. He opened her eyes to experiencing how differently-abled folks operate in day to day life. While he passed suddenly when Erica was 11 years old, this relationship had set one aspect of her life’s purpose into motion: Accessible experiences.
It was a blind developer who spoke at a small JQUERY accessibility seminar in 2013, Birkir (Dingba) Gunnarsson, who made it click for Erica. He demonstrated for the audience how he uses assistive technology to navigate websites — and, importantly how that technology fails — even when sites were purportedly AA compliant. In his closing remarks, Birkir said: “Understand that for most of you, technology makes things more convenient. For some of us, it makes things POSSIBLE.”
Boom. That was the Mic Drop moment. Everything clicked. Erica’s mission as a designer was crystal clear, and she knew this special take on design would be her super power — thanks to Uncle Greg, and Birkir.
A VERY SERIOUS MISSION
Since 2009 Erica has had the privilege of helping two of the largest banks in North America bring their digital properties into WCAG compliance, and that triggered a thirst to replicate those successes by applying the same easy principles to every experience she’s had a hand in architecting. It became clear that, through giving special attention to process, structure and hierarchy, the things we create could have utility and purpose for the people to whom it has the greatest impact.
All these years later, Erica still carries that torch, and it led her to Service Design — finding solutions at the intersection of business, its stakeholders, and its community. Projects in the health and human services and health and wellness spaces have afforded Erica & her teams delicious opportunities to push, pull and produce new standards of excellence in accessible design. One core value we operate by is:
Accessible design doesn’t ask for permission
Creating accessible experiences for everyone must be an unspoken mission that designers bake-into our process and build-into outcomes from the very start.
Check out the Panorama project and the Helix Innovation Lab to see some neat work that elevates accessibility to the next level.
