“Why is it so challenging for us to reformulate the objectives of our discipline and the central values of our educational programs? It is because those were not the basis upon which we argued for the legitimacy of our practice. By legitimizing HCI and its role in technology production in terms of user experience, user delight, and user acceptance—which were only ever means toward other ends—we have ceded the space from which we could argue for the considerations that were actually at the center of the discipline’s ambitions …

First, where we want to speak beyond usability to broader concerns—privacy, autonomy, control over data, and so on, what we might broadly frame as concerns for human flourishing—we find that the legitimacy trap rules these topics as outside HCI’s purview.”

http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2019/user-experience-as-legitimacy-trap

Developing confidence as a designer

“It’s a designer’s role to inspire people and bring people along a journey of change. And I really despair at the amount of pitches I watch and designers I meet who don’t show … they don’t convince me that they believe in themselves and their ideas. I always think “If you don’t believe in it, then I’m not going to believe in it, regardless of how good the idea is.”

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-service-design-thinking/id1104134900?mt=2