GA week 11
Dec. 2nd, 2023 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brightperegrineLessons have tapered off this week in favor of worktime. However, we had some special topic sessions that were interesting.
One special topic was ethics in design, proposed by me. It turns out that I am not the only designer with thoughts about the ways in which capitalism affects the incentives of how the internet works! I am also not the only person concerned by things such as KOSA or the California Age Appropriate Design Act, which say they will make things online safer at the cost of gross privacy violations.
Interestingly, one of the instructors, Dan, really approached this from the angle of being in the room as a UX employee to advocate against developing products in privacy-violating ways, rather than approaching this from the legal side. I'm not sure whether that's a refusal to engage with the idea of how these potential laws will make things worse, or a message to us as students that we have professional influence to stop this. Possibly both. The issue is, I've heard a lot of stories where bright-eyed young people with ideals go into tech, and end up pushing those same things they vowed to stop for a cushy wage.
Another special topic was further Figma use by the other instructor, Sean. He took a Figma design by a previous group and rebuilt it to look better. He made boxes to separate out elements as they actually would be grouped in HTML, and then completely redid the spacing and hierarchy. There were other things too, like making placeholder videos have a subtle gradient towards the bottom and putting information in buttons.
Maybe when I am done with GA, I should do a weekly Figma exercise. The problem is that I'll only be motivated to do it if I can post it somewhere, and Dreamwidth doesn't have good image hosting. Maybe this will be an exercise in file compression.
One special topic was ethics in design, proposed by me. It turns out that I am not the only designer with thoughts about the ways in which capitalism affects the incentives of how the internet works! I am also not the only person concerned by things such as KOSA or the California Age Appropriate Design Act, which say they will make things online safer at the cost of gross privacy violations.
Interestingly, one of the instructors, Dan, really approached this from the angle of being in the room as a UX employee to advocate against developing products in privacy-violating ways, rather than approaching this from the legal side. I'm not sure whether that's a refusal to engage with the idea of how these potential laws will make things worse, or a message to us as students that we have professional influence to stop this. Possibly both. The issue is, I've heard a lot of stories where bright-eyed young people with ideals go into tech, and end up pushing those same things they vowed to stop for a cushy wage.
Another special topic was further Figma use by the other instructor, Sean. He took a Figma design by a previous group and rebuilt it to look better. He made boxes to separate out elements as they actually would be grouped in HTML, and then completely redid the spacing and hierarchy. There were other things too, like making placeholder videos have a subtle gradient towards the bottom and putting information in buttons.
Maybe when I am done with GA, I should do a weekly Figma exercise. The problem is that I'll only be motivated to do it if I can post it somewhere, and Dreamwidth doesn't have good image hosting. Maybe this will be an exercise in file compression.