More about PDN:

The Prosocial Design Network connects research to practice toward a world in which online spaces are healthy, productive, respect human dignity, and improve society.

Here’s their recap of the event, and a video of our Q&A segment (15 minutes).

They shared the questions in advance, which I very much appreciated! Here are my prepared notes - we certainly didn’t cover it all during the call.

What principles should be front of mind in designing inclusive digital spaces, particularly social spaces?

First off, hire people with different lived experiences from yours. Hire trans people. Hire Black people. Hire disabled people. Hire disabled Black trans people. Let them cook. Listen to them. Otherwise you are, as my wife says, “Pissing into the wind.”

Prioritize accessibility. Ensure spaces are accessible for users on many devices, using different device settings, in different contexts in the real world including with assistive technologies. Often accessibility is an afterthought. Shift left and allow it go drive your design and architecture decisions from the jump. For social apps, this includes setting smart defaults - i.e. requiring folks to add alt text if they’re uploading images.

Keep your tech stack light and boring. Design for a 4-year-old Android phone on a 3g connection, with bandwidth paid for by the megabyte. Bloatware takes longer to load and harms or disincentivizes participation from folks on slower connections or older tech.

Design for trust, privacy and safety. Design for people to be able to protect their privacy, control what they share and what they see.

• Don’t ask for information you don’t need, and tell people why you’re asking for what you do need.
• Make privacy and sharing settings crystal clear.
• Remind folks that no site is 100% secure even if you’re encrypting every bit.
• Provide feedback/reporting mechanisms.
• Allow people to block/opt out of interacting with others or groups, or types of content.
• Don’t overpromise! If you have gaps or areas still under development, name them.
• Have good documentation and support. Don’t leave people wondering what to do.
• Look to successful, intentionally-designed communities - like BlackSky - for cues about designing inclusive, safe spaces.

Allow people to define themselves. The way you do it ain’t the way everybody else does it.

• Be aware of any type of binary options when it comes to identifying themselves - not just gender, but everything else. Are you technical or nontechnical? Employed or unemployed? Full-time or part-time? In all of these cases it’s not so clear.
• Think in terms of checkboxes, not radios. Tagging, not categorizing.
• Give people freedom in choosing avatars or profile images.
• Give people freedom to change/update usernames and login email addresses without hassle.
• Don’t make inferences about who people are or what they’d like based on their gender, race or other things that they choose to share with you.
• Confront your own ideas about people having one “true identity” - like a real name policy or assuming that everyone has the same interactions with everyone in their lives in every context. We certainly know this is true because 4chan exist(ed) - but let’s also remember that this might be the way that a trans person tries on a new name for the first time.

You may have noticed this isn’t necessarily specific to trans-inclusive design. That’s because this is the kind of work that, by considering folks in marginalized positions, benefits everyone. It’s the curb cut effect for accessibility AND privacy AND safety AND inclusion. By focusing our design on the margins we include everyone between them too.

Since you wrote your article in 2019, what are fails sites continue to make when it comes to trans inclusive design?

The biggest fail I continue to see is that folks are asking for gender or sex information at all, because it is usually not needed. It usually means that this data is being brokered into a database somewhere and sold for money.

I don’t need to tell you my gender to book a hotel. Why are you asking for it?

The unnecessary asking for gender gets worse now that we are seeing a rollback of previous progress in inclusive design we had made in the past few years. We’d been doing so well! The US Web Design system had a really thoughtful pattern about asking for gender that was starting to roll out to all these government forms. But now agencies are in the process of removing the pattern for asking for gender in an inclusive way, and replacing it with a binary option for sex.

These design systems changes are in addition to removing all references to being trans from websites, and no longer offering services or information for trans people. It’s a very literal erasure of trans identity. It’s really upsetting, scary, and for trans folks, it’s existential.

I encourage practitioners to plan ahead for the moment when you are asked to do something that you know is wrong. That day will come. What will you say? What will you say no to? What’s your red line?

What new concerns do you have with AI and do you have any advice for tech folk?

I have a lot of concerns with AI. I do think there are useful applications for the technology, and 99.99% of the applications out there are either actively predatory, passively harmful, gratuitous and mid, or all of the above. And they are all harming the environment and our health.

1. Garbage in, garbage out. AI is pattern recognition. And the patterns it’s trained on are filled with bias! Bias harms people who are in the minority. According to a recent study out of Stanford:

   “synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs …perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities.” - Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models (2024)

2. …and this includes code. When AI is trained on design patterns or code that is widely popular, but that also includes a lot of code that’s inaccessible or unusable, the resulting code is also inaccessible or unusable. We should also be extremely wary of any AI tool that claims it can refactor a codebase written in a language that most modern coders are not using.

3. AI is a tool of capitalism and state violence. Generative AI is being used to consolidate, analyze, and generate information in a way that can be used to surveil, prosecute, incarcerate, and kill people.

4. AI is seen as a smart humanoid. People tend to believe algorithms more than each other as task complexity increases - but we also tend to view AI as human-like. We anthropomorphize AI tools by giving them human-like names or designing them as chat prompts (rather than command prompts or even search boxes), which leads us to believe that we are in fact talking with another living being rather than a computer. It also leads some folks to think that AI will become sentient. It won’t, actually, but it will if humans believe that it is, which is perhaps worse.

5. AI is mid. And by that, I mean that what it produces is functionally a middle-of-the-road, average, non-“edge case” output. This flattens our differences and creates a “norm” which actually does not exist. Individual people aren’t “normal”, but AI sure likes to tell us that’s a thing, and that really harms people who are far from that norm. Saying that everyone is the same denies the fact that we are all weird as hell. It’s our differences that make us stronger, more creative, better.

6. Critique is painted as fear. Proponents of AI say that skeptics are “afraid” of AI or don’t understand it. I, for one, am not afraid of it - I’m frustrated by how folks are positioning it as the solution to all our problems. I do understand it! I know too much. Dismissing AI detractors as “fearful” allows proponents to dismiss valid critique outright rather than engage with it. It’s a strawman argument.

   If you are AI-critique curious:

   • Algorithmic Justice League
   • Distributed AI Research Institute
   • Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
   • We deserve better than an AI-powered future

My AI wishlist for technologists

If you don’t need to use AI, don’t. Do something else. Turn off default settings that include AI. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo and turn off AI features. Turn off Apple intelligence. Turn off Google Gemini. Take a harm-reduction approach to your tech use. (FWIW, this is my approach to eating animal food products. I’m not vegan or even completely vegetarian, but I don’t build my food habits around animal products, which reduces how many animal products I consume.)

Don’t make AI your main thing. Charles Eames said, “Never delegate understanding.” Don’t rely on AI alone to make decisions about what’s true, certainly not for core parts of your work.

Understand the bias that ships with your LLM. Do everything you can to critically evaluate outputs for inaccessible, biased or otherwise harmful content. Right-size your models and turn down the “creativity” setting.

Advocate for sustainable, safe AI, including regulation and environmental mitigation measures. Individual choices get us down the road a piece, but what we really need is to mitigate the impacts at a high level.

Engage your discomfort. If someone critiques AI and it makes you uncomfortable, listen to understand and be open to changing your mind. Most of the folks who are warning about the harms of AI are minoritized people - Black and brown women, queer and trans people. Believe them!

Are there any questions you think researchers could help answer regarding trans-inclusive design?

This is an excellent question. Some of the things I’d ask folks to understand include…

What are ways we can design for trust and safety? How can we create digital spaces where people feel safe? What are some of the ways we can foster trustworthiness?

What would trans-informed design look like? How can we use the very concept of transness - boundary-crossing, liminality, non-binary thinking - to expand our thinking about how technologies can be used, and to what ends?

Oliver Haimson is studying this very thing, and his new book Trans Technologies is available for free, open access, from MIT Press.

How might trans-inclusive digital design change IRL service design? We’re already seeing this as part of our work in Civic Tech, moving from automation to true digital transformation. We all know that real-world constraints map to technological design choices. How then do we transform the tech stack and use that to change our very service delivery model?

Jump to: Jargon translator, Transferable skills

Prepare to leave

There are a lot of logistical and emotional components of job-hunting, applying, interviewing, and changing jobs. That part alone is hard, and it’s plenty to have to do. But also prepare yourself for the inevitable grief of leaving your field, as well as the identity shift that happens when you leave.

Resources:

• Finding your purpose after academia - amazing resource from H. Alpert Abrams
• Vocational awe: the lies we tell ourselves By Fobazi Ettarh
• Quit lit: compendium of posts from people who left academia
• Sabbatical by Becca Quon
• What it took to take the leap by Eira Tansey
• Career change resources by Alexis Logsdon
• What it means to leave by me
• https://medium.com/@michellehandy94/from-phd-to-product-my-messy-journey-into-industry-f1046a22a754

What do you want to do?

• What are you good at?
• What do you want to do more of?
• What do you require?
• Do you want a job or a career? How much heart/soul can you put into your work?

Ask yourself if your career actually needs to have a trajectory.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. What does “career success” look like for you? If it looks like climbing a ladder, you are probably not reading this right now.

It doesn’t have to be a forever-job. It can be a for-now job.

It can be really easy to search for the dream job/company that you’ll stay at forever! Sometimes, though, you just need a job to get you started, to pivot into another field or get you experience doing X, Y, or Z. Don’t stress yourself out looking for a perfect forever job.

Find a job you could do, that pays you enough to live, and that gets you the experience you need.

Resource: former librarian Alexis Logsdon wrote an incredibly helpful series of posts on planning your career transition.

Learn how to tell your story

Before you start applying for jobs, think about how you’d answer the question “tell us about yourself” in 1-2 minutes at the start of an interview. Tie your past work and interests to the thing that you want to do next. That is the story that you will tell your interviewers, your network on LinkedIn, and most importantly yourself as you’re moving through the job hunt process.

Resource: How to tell your story and enter the UX field from Michele L’Heureux

Gather the goods

What artifacts do you have that can help you tell your story?

• Things you’ve written: articles, blog posts, policies, strategy documents, memos, project plans
• Presentations you’ve given
• Projects you’ve initiated, led, or contributed significantly to
• Any other artifacts that represent your work.

Do your research

Use your strong research skills to learn how things work outside of academia.

Do informational interviews

Ask friends and friends of friends for informational interviews. People are so very generous! A quick half-hour call will give you a lot of insight into what a person’s job and workplace is like, what kinds of things they’re responsible for, and even the words they use to talk about what they do. Soak it up.

See what others are doing

Dust off your LinkedIn account. Start searching for people who are talking about things you’re interested in. Follow them, and follow who they follow. You don’t have to “connect” with them if you don’t want; you can just follow their posts.

Look for jobs

By looking at job ads you can learn what types of words/phrases people are using to describe certain skills. Refine your search as you find new keywords in job postings.

All job ads are aspirational. You won’t have 100% of the qualifications for every job. If you have half the qualifications, apply.

Resources:

• An Academic’s Guide to Getting a Non-Academic Job
• https://medium.com/@michellehandy94/from-phd-to-product-my-messy-journey-into-industry-f1046a22a754
• From me: Job-hunting in tech after leaving librarianship

Figure out your system

Dive in. Your process will emerge.

I recommend starting a spreadsheet to track each role you’re interested in, whether you applied, the employer, a link to the job, your application status, when you applied, and any other notes you want to make (salary? concerns?)

Where to look for jobs

• Best places to start: LinkedIn and Indeed
• Nonprofit jobs: Idealist.org
• Higher ed jobs: Chronicle of Higher Ed Jobs; job sites for institutions in your area
• Public sector/government jobs:
  • Job sites for your municipality, state, and usajobs.gov
  • Public sector job board on LinkedIn is a great weekly roundup of tech/UX jobs in governments
• Words of Mouth is a weekly email newsletter with job postings across the arts, digital jobs at nonprofits, etc. Also includes fellowships. This list is really tailored for GLAM/academic-adjacent folks.

LinkedIn is, unfortunately, a thing

LinkedIn is weirdly very important outside of higher ed, especially in the private sector.

• Fill out your profile - add a brief bio (remember your story) and add more details about your responsibilities/accomplishments in previous/current work and volunteer experience.
• Model your profile based on what others are doing - lurk and find folks whose profiles look good to you and note how they are using LinkedIn. Make any changes to your profile that feel authentic for you.
• Make/strengthen connections - reach out to folks in your existing network and add new people that you know. LinkedIn is extremely creepy and knows who you know. Just add ‘em.
• Ask for help - either as a post, or through messaging folks. Most folks are very eager to add connections, exchange messages, share links to jobs, offer referrals, and share information about their work.
• Weak social ties are crucial for finding jobs - so don’t be afraid to reach out to acquaintances on LinkedIn.

Apply

Gird your loins

The job market, especially in UX and adjacent fields in 2024, is awful 🙂. No matter what field you’re in, though, be prepared to be ghosted at any point in the application process. Don’t take it personally.

Transferable skills

Your skills are transferable!

Here are some transferable skills I identified for myself:

• Talking with people and building relationships
• Managing projects and stakeholders
• Recruiting, hiring, retaining, rewarding, and managing people
• Facilitating meetings and workshops, and presenting to groups of all sizes
• Writing for different audiences, including communicating “professionally”
• Mapping out, clarifying, and streamlining workflows
• Strategic planning
• Understanding how technologies connect and how the internet works
• Putting theory into practice for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility
• Research: survey design, interviews, usability testing, log analysis, data analysis, (light) statistical analysis
• Writing: reports, policies, blog posts, project plans, academic papers
• Instructional design
• Web design, writing for the web, working with legacy processes and systems

Transferable skills for librarians

• Reference/instruction/outreach librarians
  • Complex search strategies, keywords and advanced query construction; bibliographies; information-seeking across multiple complex databases
  • Event management, publicity, and facilitation
  • Curriculum development, instructional design learning assessments, public speaking
  • Digital content development; learning management platforms
  • Working with SMEs (faculty) to create/manage content
• If you’ve used LibGuides, congrats! You have used a content management system with a variety of content types and complex user roles.
  • If you’ve managed LibGuides you have experience with content governance, information architecture, and (likely) web design.
• Data management librarians
  • Any Python, R, data modeling, data governance, or data security work
  • Working with campus partners to help meet federal mandates

Resources:

• Social Sciences & Humanities to UX Research from Amy Santee
• Interview with Pam Drouin, who moved from librarianship to UX

Jargon translator

Here are a few terms that might help in translating your skills for a new context:

ℹ️ I’d really like to expand this section! Please write me with any additions.

Prep your resume

• Great advice from Alison Green on this. Big note: your resume is a marketing document.
• Your resume should be 1-2 pages
• Make it easily skimmable. No big chunks of text. Numbers where possible.
• Where possible, match the language of the job posting with your resume
• Tailor your resume for each job you apply for
• Tailor your cover letter for each job you apply for
• Keep a few different “flavors” of your resume depending on which types of roles you are applying for, then adjust as needed for each application.
• In writing about what you worked on, focus on measurable accomplishments rather than listing duties.
• Each job description should be shorter than the one before
• No need to go back more than 10 years. “Recent work experience” is good!

Interview

Each interview should be a conversation and a learning opportunity, and a way to practice talking about yourself. An interview shouldn’t be an inquisition, and if it feels like one, that may be a sign to pull yourself out of the applicant pool.

Be prepared to go through multiple rounds of interviews spread out over several weeks. Again, prepare to be ghosted at any time.

Answer questions

Have a few stories at the ready: tell us about a conflict, tell us about an initiative you led from start to finish, tell us about managing up, tell us about working with a difficult client. Think about the projects you have worked on.

What stories do you have to tell about working with stakeholders in an organization, navigating competing priorities or compromising?

Ask questions

Ask a LOT of questions. You want to know what you’re getting into, and employers want someone who is curious and motivated.

Depending on the vibe of the interview, you might ask questions after you answer their questions:

“You asked about managing multiple competing priorities. How are priorities set and communicated here? Who would the person in this role work with to establish a good priority order?”

Here are some of my favorite questions to ask hiring teams:

• I see that this is a (new role

  existing role). What does success look like for the person in this role? Why did the person in this role previously move on?

• How will you work with the person in this role? How do you collaborate and what duties would you like to see this person take on?
• What goals and initiatives does your company have around diversity, equity and inclusion? What are some challenges or opportunities? (If they don’t have a good answer for this, it’s a red flag.)
• What are some growing edges for the organization? What are y’all actively trying to improve right now?
• How do y’all support each other in both completing work and making sure you take care of yourselves outside of work? Do folks take their vacations here?
• What questions am I not asking that I should be? What do you wish you’d known before you started work?

Resource: Carter Baxter has shared a comprehensive list of questions to ask potential employers.

References don’t really matter

A lot of places outside of higher ed and nonprofits don’t care about calling your references. Instead of calling references, they will simply make you go through a 4-6 step interview process!

In my experience, places only call to verify your former employment at an organization - not get a character reference.

Hang in there

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about leaving a specialized role in a field that encourages folks to achieve national recognition as an individual scholar, it’s that I’m not actually that special. But what I do have is the wisdom of seeing how institutions work and understanding what makes those gears turn. That knowledge translates very easily across sectors and organizations.

You are going to get there! Keep going.

Change log

• 2025/04/27 Moved to this URL, added change log, updated markdown formatting

This post is a follow-up: supporting my wife as she exited a harmful work situation, moving nine states away, changing careers, and finding professional footing again after a long run in higher ed and academic libraries.

What happened after I wrote that post

I stayed six more years at my job. During that time:

• I was promoted from line librarian to department head and did some great work that I was proud of.
• I married a fellow academic at my institution. Cue the two-body problem.
• COVID hit and, like many folks, I reassessed my career.
• Meanwhile, my wife’s working conditions became untenable.
• She went on the market and got a great job offer.
• We moved nine states away.
• I left my job and changed career fields twice in two years.

We made our move in 2022, and it has taken me almost two years to write this post. Writing it has been healing. It’s still not where I want it to be, but I need to just publish it so I can write about other things.

Giving myself permission to go

How did this happen? Things moved slowly ‘til they didn’t.

The COVID career reassessment

Our rapid shift to work-from-home during COVID made me realize not only that I could work from home, but that I loved it. Remote work gave me more separation between work and my personal life, not less. At the end of each day, I’d sign off work, close my laptop, and walk immediately into the kitchen to make dinner. During a time of unceasing chaos in the world, I had the immense privilege of this centering routine. It’s something I still cherish being able to do.

Go high, go deep, or get out

In the midst of intersecting global crises, a pandemic and an insurrection, I also increasingly struggled to feel that the work I was doing every day mattered. I didn’t want to climb the ladder any further, and I knew that if I wanted to leave my specialized field, it needed to happen soon.

In my post eight years ago, I wrote about a friend telling me I could “go high or go deep” in my career. Over time, I realized there was a third option: to just go.

Letting go of the idea of a career arc

I started to do research. I met with generous friends and friends-of-friends who had been working in the private sector for years. I learned the language that people used to describe their work, and how they framed problems they were trying to solve. It sounded interesting and not totally dissimilar from my experience.

I slowly began to detach myself from the idea that my career needed to go in a straight line. I gave myself permission to go, and to try something new.

The two-body problem

While I was exploring my exit from academia, my wife’s working conditions at our university continued to deteriorate, even and especially after she got tenure. Though my situation in the library was better, her experience affected me, too. It had real consequences for both of our health and well-being. I also felt disappointed and frustrated with the institution for overworking, ignoring, and ultimately turning its back on my wife.

By the time my wife got her new job offer, we’d both gotten our heads where they needed to be for us to move on. It was time to go.

Making the move

Things really fell into place once we decided to go, which made the transition a lot easier. Within a month, we sold a house, bought a house, and I got a fully remote job at a small consultancy (based partly on the connections I’d made at my library job). Moving is hard enough; we were lucky that it went as smoothly as it could have.

The hardest thing was leaving our people

The featured image for this post is a photo of our dear neighbors gathering early in the morning of our moving day to hug us and send us on our way.

Almost two years later, saying goodbye is still the part that physically aches to think about. Leaving our jobs was relatively easy; leaving the home we’d created and our web of love and support – friends, neighbors, and colleagues – hurt the most. My wife and I had collectively spent 21 years creating our community in Richmond. It was heartbreaking to go.

The second hardest thing was the identity crisis

Skip forward to the move. My wife and I were navigating big changes together: new part of the country, new city, new home, new jobs. Along with all of these big changes came some seismic identity shifts for me as I stepped into a new workplace.

For years prior, I told myself I had a distinct identity separate from my career in libraries, and to some degree, I did. But my professional identity crisis after leaving higher ed was still intense and painful.

Finding legibility

Academic librarianship was such a tidy professional identity for me. I’d established myself in my field, was a respected leader at my institution, and was confident in my work. My wife was an academic, too. Many of our friends worked at the university where we worked. All of it fit so neatly together before. Now that I wasn’t in libraries or in higher ed, what was I?

Changing career fields, I struggled to find a new way to relate to my professional identity and tell my story in a way that was legible not only to others, but to me.

This took a long time and is still a work in progress. But it was a potent and necessary reminder that I needed to embrace that I am a person who exists outside of the work I do.

Releasing the expectations

Despite the professional identity crisis, I also felt a deep sense of relief when I was able to release the expectations I didn’t even know I was holding for myself.

I stopped worrying (or even thinking) about many of the things I had found extremely important when I was working in libraries. I felt guilty, but when I could viscerally sense the tension releasing in my body, the guilt turned to relief. I exhaled. I imagine this is what it’s like for many people when they retire.

New to the job, but not new to work

Starting a new job in an entirely new field after 13 years at the same employer was scary. I wasn’t entirely sure I had the experience to do the job well, and was worried that I was stuck in my ways. By the end of the first week, though, I saw obvious areas where I could plug in and realized I brought lots of skills along with me.

Transferable skills

Many folks who have left libraries and higher ed have talked about transferable skills. Some, in particular, that I carried with me into the private sector:

• Talking with people and building relationships
• Managing projects and stakeholders
• Recruiting, hiring, retaining, rewarding, and managing people
• Facilitating meetings and workshops, and presenting to groups of all sizes
• Writing for different audiences, including communicating “professionally”
• Mapping out, clarifying, and streamlining workflows
• Strategic planning
• Understanding how technologies connect and how the internet works
• Putting theory into practice for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility
• Instructional design, web design, writing for the web, working with legacy processes and systems, data analysis, research, and so much more.

Same shit, different context

The biggest transferable skill I brought with me, though, was perspective.

I spent the first part of my career learning how to navigate ambiguity, see the forest as well as the trees, build relationships, and create good work I was proud of. Entering new workspaces, I realized I’d learned how to read patterns, relationships, power structures, issues and assets in a much different way, and to identify what was going on at an organizational level. No matter where I went, I had the maturity and x-ray vision of someone who’d seen things. I also had a much stronger sense of where I wanted my boundaries to be, and I stuck to ’em.

Knowing myself

After well over a decade of working full time, I also felt at ease about who I was, what I did and didn’t bring, and where I needed to grow. I wasn’t afraid to say “I don’t know.” Though I was apprehensive about starting something new, I was less self-conscious than I was when I first entered the professional world. I very much owned my mid-career status, rather than feeling like a total newbie.

And because all my coworkers were new to me, not folks I had worked with since I was 24, they didn’t see me as a newbie, either.

Beginner’s brain

My new company’s culture was extremely welcoming for newcomers, and I felt supported to be completely honest about how this was a big transition and a learning curve for me.

Rather than seeing me just as someone who needed to be brought up to speed, my new coworkers saw my newness as a value-add. They asked what I thought as someone with fresh eyes on the business, and we ended up implementing several changes early on based on my ideas.

It also felt refreshing to be very new at something, to feel that uncertainty again for the first time in a while, and to remind myself that this was something I was capable of handling.

I also relished learning about how businesses work, which would help me later on when (much to my own surprise) I started my own business. I felt new synapses firing.

The second quarter of my career

Early on at my new job, a coworker explained her move to our company as “the way I wanted to spend the last quarter of my career.” My coworker had carefully chosen where she wanted to spend her last few years in the workforce. She wasn’t putting pressure on herself to follow a certain career progression.

Thinking of work-life as a series of strategic moves, rather than a graph going forever up, resonated with me. Thanks to my new colleague I had words for what was happening. I was starting the second quarter of my career.

A final note on leaving academia

Anyway, all I ever meant by “the institution cannot love you” was this: whether the institution makes you feel great or horrible, it isn’t about you. Institutions aren’t choosing NOT to love you. They are choosing to reproduce themselves.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Many smart folks have written about leaving academia. Academic and cultural heritage institutions anywhere are going to do one thing for certain: self-perpetuate at all costs. “Institutions gonna institution” is a common refrain at our house.

The more I moved into leadership positions at my previous institution, the pricklier I felt about maxims like “the institution cannot love you”, because it felt personal. But it’s not personal. Academic and cultural heritage institutions thrive when employees believe these falsehoods:

• This work is a vocation, a calling – not just a job.
• You are your work. Your work is you.
• You can’t be useful in any other field.
• Overwork is a virtue. (And often, a requirement.)
• If you do a good job, the reward is more work.
• A vacancy is no excuse not to do the work.
• If you don’t do it, no one will.
• You can always do more with less.
• You’ll need an outside offer if you dare to ask for a raise.
• If you just follow the right administrative process, justice will be served.
• The institution cares about you and will protect you.

My wife’s situation brought a lot of this into sharp focus for me. I realized that, especially as a middle manager, I had believed and perpetuated many of these myths for years. Leaving academia helped me see this all more clearly and learn what’s important for me.

My departure from academia made space for my wife to heal, too. Though she’s still in higher ed, her workplace is unionized, and she has far more protections than before. And because I’ve got a foot planted firmly outside of academia, we are both a little more more grounded, hopeful and happy.

This story is to be continued. Maybe there’ll be another update in 2032. Stay tuned.

Resources

For folks sticking around to fight the good fight in higher ed: the United Campus Workers Union continues to grow its power.

I’ve started, and continue to update, a guide to getting a job outside of academia, in part because so many folks have reached out for advice. Perhaps you’ll find it useful too.

Some related posts from former cultural heritage workers that have helped me a lot:

• Sabbatical by Becca Quon
• What it took to take the leap by Eira Tansey
• Finding your purpose by Hannah Alpert-Abrams

Thank you for reading.

This is a lightly edited transcript of our interview in September 2023, shared here with her permission.

Erin joins us today to talk about what it’s like to be an information architect within an organization and how IA’s utilize organization, labeling, navigational systems in their day to day. Welcome, Erin.

Thank you. So excited to be here.

I know, we’re really excited to have you. Before we dive into IA, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and your career journey?

Yeah, sure. Like like many folks in the tech space, it’s been kind of a winding path for me. I’ve been making websites since 1998, since I was like a teenager. Didn’t really have many friends but I did have a dial-up modem connection!

Eventually I found myself in a graduate program for information science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I knew that I wanted to do digital things and I was really interested in building for the web, but I wanted a theoretical match for that, to understand why we do what we do. I learned a lot and came out on the other side as an academic librarian.

And you know this, because you hired me for my first job!

Okay. I was just thinking about that today. I think you were my first hire ever.

Yeah! It was January of 2009. I interviewed for the job at Virginia Commonwealth University. I came in as a as a web developer, and at that time, “full stack web development” was – the word didn’t exist yet, but that’s basically what I was doing. Web design, web development, a little bit of usability and UX research and a little bit of information architecture.

And then I worked at VCU Libraries for 13 years. When I left I was a department head, leading digital strategy. By the time I was in that role as a department head, I wasn’t so much doing that hands on work anymore. I was leading a team, which I loved. Eventually, though, I was looking for something new. My family relocated a year ago, my wife got a new job, and I took that as an opportunity to pivot my career.

Over the past 15+ years, the roles in web work have specialized a lot as the field has matured. IA had always been one of, like, 20 things that I’d done as part of my job. When I was job hunting earlier this year I decided to try to go all in on information architecture as a career. There’s not a lot of roles out there; there are a lot more in corporate settings and or in large scale government settings.

I had been interested in entering the federal space for a while, then applied at Ad Hoc, and here we are.

We talked a lot at my last organization about Squiggly Line careers instead of the straight path. It sounds like you’ve definitely been on that journey.

Yeah, once I got rid of that idea that I needed to have a career path that just looked like a graph going up, that it could just sort of meander, and I didn’t necessarily have to manage people in order to advance in a career or feel like I was achieving things – I think that’s when I really was able to embrace an individual contributor role, on a team.

It’s different. My current role is really…it’s been a nice fit so far.

Fantastic. What do you find in this transition to a full-time IA since you had other things in the mix – web design, web development – what’s it like to have this full time IA role?

Well, for one thing, it feels like kind of a luxury to be able to just focus in on one practice area. With larger digital shops, you have people who are able to really be focused in on their area of expertise. You have people who are content strategists, who are UX researchers, who are developers. So to to really be able to focus in on the practice area of IA has been really great, and it’s allowed my knowledge to increase really rapidly, because I’m doing it every day instead of it being, you know, one of 20 things that I’m worried about.

Another thing I’ve noticed is, there’s a permeable membrane between information architecture and more strategic work on these projects. I’ve started to work on issues at my job that are not just specific to web interfaces or digital products, but that are more 30,000-foot messy information problems. For example, if we are trying to get a handle on a set of concepts, or how to categorize or group clusters of objects, ideas, etc.

It’s been cool to be able to focus on the website, but also to know that there are thorny info problems that really need that IA brain to be able to to conceptualize, put words on things, and be able to move the conversation. It’s about creating that generative space where you get people together talking about something and you’re asking the questions to move the conversation. IAs do that a lot and it’s a skill that really translates.

Yeah, definitely. When you think about, you know, the traditional things that we learn in IA: organizational systems, labeling systems, navigational systems – how does that appear in some of the day-to-day work that you do?

I think about this a lot in day-to-day work. I’m working on a huge federal project and my team specifically is a governance team. So we work with all the other teams that are working on this digital ecosystem to make sure that what they create is consistent based on standards, and that it’s going to be a unified experience for our users.

I’m not necessarily creating site maps or generating user flows, but what I am doing is working with others to give them guidance and review their work, and make sure that we’re all solving good problems.

We talk about organization a lot. One of the cool things about about this project is that we do a lot of user research. We talk to a lot of people and really try to use that research to understand people’s mental models of what they’re doing, understand how they think, how they group items together in their brains so that we can try to match what we’re building to those conceptual models. Everybody’s got a different brain, but you can observe themes and trends and make some decisions based on that.

On the flip side, we’re working often with legacy systems and designs. This isn’t the first time we’re building, a page about a service. There was a page or entire website about that service that was developed 20 years ago. And at the time, the way that we made websites was different. We didn’t have an emphasis on user research. We were building websites that matched our organizational structures.

That’s Conway’s Law, where the software you build matches your org structure pretty much one to one.

Yeah, Conway wrote that in the sixties and we’re still seeing it in a lot of sites.

Yeah, I saw it when I started at VCU! I was joining you in your work and you were like, oh my god, this website is the library org chart, and we need to undo that.

Yep, exactly.

So there’s a lot of legacy work untangling that and reorganizing to better match how people might actually use the site and understand things.

That’s really awesome to hear about the user research. Within this class, we’ve had a lot of emphasis on user research. One group has done a card sort, and they’ve also interviewed each other to try to dig in to how people think about labeling, and really making sense of any mess, to quote Abby the IA. You know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a meeting or not; IA is really integral to being able to connect those dots, but also simplify language.

Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like a lot of times the IA is also the person who will be saying, “Okay, I’ve got the 30,000 foot view of the ecosystem. Let’s talk about how how all of it ties together, and how folks might understand the whole picture of what they’re working with.”

UX folks are also going to be asking those questions. There’s a really strong kinship between IA and UX, and also with accessibility. There’s been a huge emphasis on accessibility with my team, which has been great because we’ve been forefronting the needs of folks with disabilities. Not just talking about folks who use screen readers, but folks with mobility issues, with cognitive impairments. Folks who are experiencing the digital product in ways that maybe people who are abled, are not.

So that’s one that’s been one of the really cool things, just seeing how everything sort of threads together.

Absolutely. A few people in this course have pointed out different ways – they watched a video from the 90s from Dan Brown from IDEO, and there were a few things in there that weren’t really thinking about how people with disabilities might use certain things.

Yeah, and there are good articles on A List Apart as well about accessibility in general, but especially designing for cognitive differences.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially since COVID, is that folks are dealing with either situational or long term cognitive impacts of COVID. More and more we’re seeing folks who need more considerate design, who need captions along with their videos – not necessarily because they can’t hear the audio, but because they need to be able to read and hear to understand.

So it’s, it’s just been really eye opening, especially in the past few years, how much that accessibility emphasis is coming to the fore. We’re talking about it and we’re making moves in that direction.

But the more time you spend on a product, the more you see that needs to be improved.

It’s UX vs UI. It can be beautiful, but it can be completely unusable.

Exactly. Switching gears just a little bit, how have you designed for search? Especially given your library background, I would imagine that would be a huge part of that, but maybe in your current role as well.

We think about search a lot.

The big search on the brain, of course, is our favorite consumer search engines: Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, the big ones. We assume that most of our traffic is coming in from search rather than someone saying, “Let me just type in the web address and click through and find the page.” None of us behave like that anymore. Search is often the default.

So, that encourages us to create digital products that are going to be optimized for search.

The good news is that if you structure your content and your site well for humans, it’ll also be structured well for robots! When you create pages that are accessible and that follow standards, best practices for web creation, that boosts your search engine optimization.

Some of this may be kind of basic information, but things like,

• Do you use headings to convey the structure of the information?
• Is there a single level-one heading that is the title of the page?
• Does the page title that shows up in the browser tab, the title tag, does that clearly reflect what the page is?
• Is there text on the page that describes, “here’s what this page is about”?
• Are you using plain language?
• Are you using clear link text? Instead of links like “click here” or “learn more”, the link describes the its destination.
• Are you not stuffing your page with keywords, because most larger search engines disregard that, and they actually often weigh against keyword stuffing.

There are other things that can be done in your content management system too, like smart title tags, adding things to the meta description for the page. If you’re using WordPress or something, use an SEO plugin and make sure that you’re structuring things well. Use some of those common navigational elements like breadcrumbs in your theme that’ll show search engines how a site is structured, alongside your site navigation.

So that’s the things that we keep in mind for big search.

Many folks in the class are professional writers, and the things that you brought up about the structure of the page are so important. In an IA class, everyone’s thinking about navigation, but there’s all these other structural elements that you brought up that are really important.

Yeah! The navigability within the page, being able to place make and understand, “What am I looking at?”

Nobody’s reading every single word on a page. I don’t do it. You don’t do it. Nobody reads every single word on the page. So we gotta design for scannability, and use words that aren’t, you know, $12 words.

There’s some really good guidance from PlainLanguage.gov about how to write for the web and how to clearly structure things for folks. It not only helps search engines, but it helps your users to access the information quickly.

And, it’s an accessibility thing. It helps folks who maybe have brain fog, or folks who just need something simple and not something clever.

Right! Well, we’re almost at time, but I have a couple last questions for you. You mentioned that IA jobs are, not as abundant as other types of roles. What do you see in some of the challenges and the opportunities for the future?

There’s a ton of opportunities. The joining of the IA and the user experience spheres is very strong. We’ve got a lot of the same concerns. “How are people using our stuff? How can we make it better? Is the interface actually doing what we want it to do?”

One thing I’ve observed, and have been thinking about a lot, is how the web is transforming from this page-based model that we had. Especially in the late nineties, it was like, “Oh, it’s a website. It’s like a book. We have web pages. Sign my guest book.” We used that book mental model to think about the web.

Now, that’s kind of blown up; it’s no longer a thing. We’re having interactions that are nonlinear. We’re having chatbot interactions. Which, chatbots are a whole information architecture tangle. We’ve got people using mobile apps and mobile websites. We’ve got people interacting with different devices in different ways, across entire ecosystems with organizations.

And then we’ve also got third party websites that have information about us. So, you know, Google has information about us. But also we might have a page on Facebook or some other site where we have claimed a page.

So being able to tie that all together in a meaningful way, and to have consistent correct information, is the challenge.

One other thing that I’ll say: I’ve learned recently about Object Oriented UX, which is similar to information architecture in that it steps back from the interface part of the UX and is asking, “What are people’s mental models? What kind of objects to people envision in their brains in this space?”

That object oriented UX approach allows you to then operationalize within an interface, but it’s much more abstracted, and that’s where I really think IA is headed.

This has been amazing. I think everyone is gonna learn so much from you in this session. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we sign off?

I’m glad you said that. I would say, consider government service. There’s a ton of good work to be done, there’s a lot more attention to it recently, and there’s some legislation coming through about technology modernization that will increase the amount of funding. So there are ways to get in, especially if you’re in UX writing and content strategy.

With government work, you’re not necessarily worried about selling something. You’re worried about, are people getting what they need?

It’s mission-driven work and can be really satisfying. So, a little plug for public service.

Gov tech is taking off. I’ve noticed it too, and many of the things that we’ve looked at in class, examples for personas, we’ve pulled from Gov.UK. We’ve also pulled some examples from the USDA, which has an amazing customer experience site. So I think that definitely is helping to amp up government sector.

Yes! Gov.UK is excellent. They’re really leading the charge on a lot of civic tech and design things. Good work being done.

Thank you so much. We really appreciate it and I think this is going to be just amazing for the students.

Thanks so much for asking me.

Job hunting, simply put, sucks. Please do not let the LinkedIn influencers tell you a new job can be willed into being if you’re just passionate enough. It’s a numbers game, a crapshoot, and a deeply demoralizing mindfuck. I’m a pretty confident person and this process had me down in the dumps. I’m sharing this info in hopes that it’s helpful for others and as a record for myself when I’m on the market again.

Big themes

Some big things that I observed:

• Jobs are more plentiful in the private/tech sector and there are also more applicants, especially for fully remote jobs. Folks are hiring on a different scale. And many companies treat applicants accordingly. 🚮
• Timelines are wacky as hell. In higher ed, it can be 4 months at best between a vacancy and a hire (and for tenure-track roles, Jesus take the wheel). The private sector moves faster…mostly. I heard back from some jobs within a day or two. Others took a few weeks. Some, I never heard back from.
• Rejections are helpful and rare. I heard back with a yes or no from only half of the jobs I applied for. 👻
• Interview processes take weeks. Every place where I got to the interview stage let me know I’d be doing at least four different video calls – on different days, different weeks – to complete the interview process. This was a disjointed process and never a positive experience for me.
• Nobody shares interview questions in advance. The really kind and inclusive practice of sharing questions in advance of an interview is becoming more common in higher ed/libraries and is just hilariously nonexistent outside of those spaces. I take that back. One of the interview session leaders at one place I interviewed sent questions in advance. I was so grateful. That was the best interview session of my entire job search.
• People want to help. With few exceptions, most folks in my network were eager to help and extremely supportive. I got better at asking for, and accepting, help. Also, shoutout to my wife for her unwavering support during this time!
• My resume isn’t special. I mean, we are all special, and I stopped being so precious about my resume and asked multiple friends to help me revise it, find ways to talk about my experience, and angle myself appropriately for new roles. Separating my self-worth from my work has been a whole journey since leaving higher ed. Hopefully getting 38 rejection emails has helped move me along the continuum a little bit.
• Money hits way different. The first time I was asked, “What are your salary requirements?” I ’bout fell out of my chair. The salaries are higher in tech than in higher ed and certainly in libraries. I have sold out. This is fine.

What seemed to work for me

• Learning the language. I had never worked in the private sector before 2022. Things are just worded differently and have different names in business, so learning some of that language was helpful. I think that’s an entirely different post and I hope I get it together!
• Updating my LinkedIn After 13 years in academia I hadn’t really thought much about my profile. LinkedIn is a whole-ass weird ecosystem especially for folks in the private sector. I found some folks who I thought had good/aspirational profiles and updated mine with more details, using language similar to theirs.
• Working my network. I reached out to friends, previous colleagues and acquaintances for advice, resume reviews, and internal referrals at their companies. Most folks were very eager to help.
• Asking for informational interviews with folks who had roles similar to the ones I wanted, or who worked at companies that interested me. I tried to keep these to a half hour to respect folks’ time. These conversations helped me (1) get better language to describe my own skills and what I wanted to do; and (2) make connections with folks who could refer me for open positions later on.
• Finding companies I wanted to work for and setting up job alerts for them.
• Updating my resume for each job application. I copy/pasted lines/phrases from the job descriptions or required qualifications into my resume then made small changes.
• Keeping track. I made a spreadsheet of jobs I applied for. Title, company, link to job ad, salary range, date applied, status (applied/no response, rejected, interviewed, etc.) and any other notes I wanted to add.
• Approaching each interview as a conversation. After being on the other side of the hiring table for a very long time, I felt more confident about myself, what I brought to the table, and the types of organizations I wanted to join. I asked questions, followed up my own answers with questions, and generally tried to understand the motivation behind each question that was asked. If someone was looking for a “bias towards action” what would that mean day-to-day? I also asked about their DEI goals and challenges which was a good litmus test for how committed companies were to tackling that work.
• Letting myself feel the feels. Truly, it is hard out there, and though it’s easy to tell myself that it wasn’t about me, I often felt stressed, sad and hopeless. When I needed to I would give myself a day or two off from applying so I could rest. And I would also remind myself that I was still glad to be out of academia.

Where I looked

• Websites for companies I was interested in for remote work and companies nearby with hybrid roles that I thought would be a match for. I signed up for so many email alerts.
• LinkedIn A necessity. Lots of jobs here, searchable on many facets. Can set up push notifications and email alerts. Highly recommend.
• Indeed Many jobs here that aren’t on LinkedIn – including local jobs, hourly, contract and term-limited jobs.
• People-first Jobs Focuses specifically on organizations that (at least claim to) put supporting their people at the top of their priority list.
• Words of Mouth an extremely useful newsletter for hearing about work/fellowships/opportunities from mission-driven companies. This is especially for folks from a humanities/writing/design background.
• Tech Jobs for Good nonprofit jobs in tech – not a super high volume but worth a subscribe.
• Public Sector Job Board Rebecca Heywood compiles an excellent weekly list of government IT/tech jobs.
• We Work Remotely more startup-y; interesting feed of remote work oppportunities

Finally, I must give a huge shoutout to the amazing folks in the GLAMed Out discord community for providing support, resume review, job leads, commiseration and shared joy. If you’re thinking about leaving your work in GLAM to seek techy jobs in other sectors, reach out! I’d love to support folks going down a similar path.

Planning for the most; or, a bellwether speaks

Hi folks,

…just a visit from your future, here. I’m the ram with the bell around its neck.

I’m Erin White. This is my 11th Code4Lib!

I’m head of digital engagement at VCU Libraries in Richmond, VA.

I’m also the interim digital collections librarian
…for the past five years or so.

Interim math

Shoutout to everyone who’s holding an interim appointment or who has absorbed a vacancy in your area. I know many of y’all have been doing this math too. The past year in particular brought so much hardship across all vectors of our lives, and at work that likely included layoffs, retirements, health-related departures, and other stark changes.

I’m in a relatively good position – I get to say how much of this work has to get done. Still, it turns out half-assing a job for a quarter of my time means projects move really slowly or not at all. [2023 editor’s note: “half-assing” was sarcastically used here to mean, “Learning how to do a job I had not done before.” A reminder that we need to be kind to ourselves and others when we take on new roles!]

Where we’re headed

I’m not sharing this with you to complain. It’s not an indictment of my employer. I share it because I think this is where we’re headed.

The early 2000s were a boom time for mass digitization and library investment in digital collections. It was a time of huge growth and excitement in digital libraries.

But, y’all, library budgets are not getting bigger. It’s not that we’re temporarily in tough times. This is how things are and will be. It sure seems to me that digital collections work, and other types of important but invisibilized work in the library, will continue to be deprioritized when budget conversations inevitably get tough. [2023 editor’s note: All this in a broader U.S. political and fiscal climate increasingly hostile to higher ed, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions.]

I won’t tell you not to hope, and fight, for the best.

I will tell you to plan for the worst. Or rather, to plan for the most. ‘Cause this is where most of us are heading. And it’s not necessarily the worst. It’s just different.

The last mile problem

There are a lot of ripple effects of disinvestment that I could talk about, but I only have a few minutes, so I’ll talk about the ones that haunt me most. 🙂

At Code4Lib 2014 Sumana Harihareswara gave a keynote that I still think about.

She talked about the last mile problem: the “largest hurdle we face in making things usable.” She gave many good examples and even wrote it up into a C4L journal article.

The bottom line is that many people don’t use services, even ones that are “best” for them, because they’re simply not usable.

The most beautiful bus stop

Here is a picture of the most beautiful bus stop in Richmond, VA. It’s my bus stop.

[2023 editor’s note: original slide text noted that there is no sidewalk, no bench, no shelter, and the stop is only serviced (unreliably) once per hour. This is still true.]

While this bus stop has the loveliest views, it has zero amenities. It’s inaccessible for many of my neighbors. And it only works well for me because I have a smartphone to check in on bus status, I have flexibility on what time I can arrive at my job, and I can walk quickly down a road with no sidewalk, dodging traffic, to catch a ride. If any of those things were to become untrue, or when the weather goes south, I can’t use the service easily.

This example is the very literal definition of the last mile problem.

The most beautiful workflows

One of the ways the last mile problem has manifested in my work-life has been that, even after a year and a half of using Islandora for our digital collections, we still haven’t figured out a workflow to batch-upload collections. We have added only one item to our digital collections since fall 2019.

First of all, as I said a few slides back, this is a result of disinvestment in libraries as a whole. Like many departments in our library, we’ve had a vacant position for years.

This is also a documentation problem. To get our process sorted out we’ve been hanging on every word of this 7-year-old blog post that’s only accessible through the Wayback Machine.

This is also, fundamentally, a last-mile problem. This upload process was designed assuming every institution had people with scripting expertise and, more importantly, time to design, code, and troubleshoot each bulk upload.

It feels personal. It’s not.

I am actually ashamed to admit this. I feel this failure in my body. I know that if I carved out two solid days I could probably get something working, right? It seems so fundamental! It should be simple. If I just tried harder. If I just had more time.

But this isn’t about me. This isn’t really about Islandora either. (BIG love and gratitude to the community of maintainers for Islandora. I know a lot of this is different in version 8. Again, this isn’t about Islandora.)

This is about beautiful bus stops that only a few people in good circumstances can use. We can and must design more usable things for each other.

Planning for the most

• Design for the margins
• Design for use
• Assume nothing
• Collaborate & de-silo
• Define innovation as a social process rather than a technical one

So I ask you to think of this. How can we adjust the angle of our vision? To set our sights on each other instead of the distant horizon of another cutting-edge revolutionary technology that’ll solve all our problems?

What if instead of thinking of this as “planning for the worst” we see it instead as “planning for the most”? Because most of us are pressed for time, for money, for the brain cells to rub together to create new workflows.

By designing for needs of institutions that have fewer resources, we can design for everybody. Because the center is NOT holding. The dividing line between have- and have-not institutions is only getting stronger, with fewer in between.

Cultural heritage organizations must continue to become interdependent with each other as time goes along. Consortial, collectively-held platforms and communities are the way we need to go. Code4Lib itself is a model of how this can work. We can make this work!

So consider this an invitation.

Let’s keep building the future we need, together.

Postscript

This talk was inspired by all of my amazing colleagues doing library tech and digital collections work, and by the book Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock. Thank you to Drew Heles at LYRASIS who reached out last year about this presentation and inspired me to post it.

When I gave this talk in March 2021, I got some feedback that it was too gloomy. After 13 years in the field, and well over a year after giving this talk, I stick by it. My takeaway is actually not gloomy at all; it’s hopeful. I believe we can have proactive new visions for the future instead of waiting for things to improve. No way out but through, no way through but together.

In the time since this talk I have left libraries and moved to a new city. My (former) institution is currently hiring a digital collections librarian.

Thanks again for reading.

Hi everybody, I’m Erin. Before I get started I want to say thank you to the RVA Design Group organizers. This is hard work and some folks have been doing it for YEARS. Thank you to the organizers of this group for doing this work and for inviting me to speak.

This talk isn’t about 2020. This talk is about the future. But to understand the future, we gotta look back.

The web in 1996

Travel with me to 1996. Twenty-five years ago!

I want to transport us back to the mindset of the early web. The fundamental idea of hyperlinks, which we now take for granted, really twisted everyone’s noodles. So much of the promise of the early web was that with broad access to publish in hypertext, the opportunities were limitless. Technologists saw the web as an equalizing space where systems of oppression that exist in the real world wouldn’t matter, and that we’d all be equal and free from prejudice. Nice idea, right?

You don’t need to’ve been around since 1996 to know that’s just not the way things have gone down.

Pictured before you are some of the early web pioneers. Notice a pattern here?

These early visions of the web, including Barlow’s declaration of independence of cyberspace, while inspiring and exciting, were crafted by the same types of folks who wrote the actual declaration of independence: the landed gentry, white men with privilege. Their vision for the web echoed the declaration of independence’s authors’ attempts to describe the world they envisioned. And what followed was the inevitable conflict with reality.

We all now hold these truths to be self-evident:

• The systems humans build reflect humans’ biases and prejudices.
• We continue to struggle to diversify the technology industry.
• Knowledge is interest-driven.
• Inequality exists, online and off.
• Celebrating, rather than diminishing, folks’ intersecting identities is vital to human flourishing.

The web we have known

Profit first: monetization, ads, the funnel, dark patterns
Can we?: Innovation for innovation’s sake
Solutionism: code will save us
Visual design: aesthetics over usability
Lone genius: “hard” skills and rock star coders
Short term thinking: move fast, break stuff
Shipping: new features, forsaking infrastructure

Let’s move forward quickly through the past 25 years or so of the web, of digital design.

All of the web we know today has been shaped in some way by intersecting matrices of domination: colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy. (Thank you, bell hooks.)

The digital worlds where we spend our time – and that we build!! – exist in this way.

This is not an indictment of anyone’s individual work, so please don’t take it personally. What I’m talking about here is the digital milieu where we live our lives.

The funnel drives everything. Folks who work in nonprofits and public entities often tie ourselves in knots to retrofit our use cases in order to use common web tools (google analytics, anyone?)

In chasing innovation™ we often overlook important infrastructure work, and devalue work — like web accessibility, truly user-centered design, care work, documentation, customer support and even care for ourselves and our teams — that doesn’t drive the bottom line. We frequently write checks for our future selves to cash, knowing damn well that we’ll keep burying ourselves in technical debt. That’s some tough stuff for us to carry with us every day.

The “move fast” mentality has resulted in explosive growth, but at what cost? And in creating urgency where it doesn’t need to exist, focusing on new things rather than repair, the end result is that we’re building a house of cards. And we’re exhausted.

To zoom way out, this is another manifestation of late capitalism. Emphasis on LATE. Because…2020 happened.

What 2020 taught us

Hard times amplify existing inequalities
Cutting corners mortgages our future
Infrastructure is essential
“Colorblind”/color-evasive policy doesn’t cut it
Inclusive design is vital
We have a duty to each other
Technology is only one piece
Together, we rise

The past year has been awful for pretty much everybody.

But what the light from this dumpster fire has illuminated is that things have actually been awful for a lot of people, for a long time. This year has shown us how perilous it is to avoid important infrastructure work and to pursue innovation over access. It’s also shown us that what is sometimes referred to as colorblindness — I use the term color-evasiveness because it is not ableist and it is more accurate — a color-evasive approach that assumes everyone’s needs are the same in fact leaves people out, especially folks who need the most support.

We’ve learned that technology is a crucial tool and that it’s just one thing that keeps us connected to each other as humans.

Finally, we’ve learned that if we work together we can actually make shit happen, despite a world that tells us individual action is meaningless. Like biscuits in a pan, when we connect, we rise together.

Marginalized folks have been saying this shit for years.
More of us than ever see these things now.
And now we can’t, and shouldn’t, unsee it.

The web we can build together

Current state:
– Profit first
– Can we?
– Solutionism
– Aesthetics
– “Hard” skills
– Rockstar coders
– Short term thinking
– Shipping

Future state:
– People first: security, privacy, inclusion
– Should we?
– Holistic design
– Accessibility
– Soft skills
– Teams
– Long term thinking
– Sustaining

So let’s talk about the future. I told you this would be a talk about the future.

Like many of y’all I have had a very hard time this year thinking about the future at all. It’s hard to make plans. It’s hard to know what the next few weeks, months, years will look like. And who will be there to see it with us.

But sometimes, when I can think clearly about something besides just making it through every day, I wonder.

What does a people-first digital world look like? Who’s been missing this whole time?

Just because we can do something, does it mean we should?

Will technology actually solve this problem? Are we even defining the problem correctly?

What does it mean to design knowing that even “able-bodied” folks are only temporarily so? And that our products need to be used, by humans, in various contexts and emotional states?

(There are also false binaries here: aesthetics vs. accessibility; abled and disabled; binaries are dangerous!)

How can we nourish our collaborations with each other, with our teams, with our users? And focus on the wisdom of the folks in the room rather than assigning individuals as heroes?

How can we build for maintenance and repair? How do we stop writing checks our future selves to cash – with interest?

Some of this here, I am speaking of as a web user and a web creator. I’ve only ever worked in the public sector. When I talk with folks working in the private sector I always do some amount of translating. At the end of the day, we’re solving many of the same problems.

But what can private-sector workers learn from folks who come from a public-sector organization?

And, as we think about what we build online, how can we also apply that thinking to our real-life communities? What is our role in shaping the public conversation around the use of technologies? I offer a few ideas here, but don’t want them to limit your thinking.

Consider the public sector

Here’s a thread about public service. ⚖️🏛️ 💪🏼💻🇺🇸

— Dana Chisnell (she / her) (@danachis) February 5, 2021

I don’t have a ton of time left today. I wanted to talk about public service like the very excellent Dana Chisnell here.

Like I said, I’ve worked in the public sector, in higher ed, for a long time. It’s my bread and butter. It’s weird, it’s hard, it’s great.

There’s a lot of work to be done, and it ain’t happening at civic hackathons or from external contractors. The call needs to come from inside the house.

Working in the public sector

Government should be
– inclusive of all people
– responsive to needs of the people
– effective in its duties & purpose

— Dana Chisnell (she / her) (@danachis) February 5, 2021

I want you to consider for a minute how many folks are working in the public sector right now, and how technical expertise — especially in-house expertise — is something that is desperately needed.

Pictured here are the old website and new website for the city of Richmond. I have a whole ‘nother talk about that new Richmond website. I FOIA’d the contracts for this website. There are 112 accessibility errors on the homepage alone. It’s been in development for 3 years and still isn’t in full production.

Bottom line, good government work matters, and it’s hard to find. Important work is put out for the lowest bidder and often external agencies don’t get it right. What would it look like to have that expertise in-house?

Influencing technology policy

We also desperately need lawmakers and citizens who understand technology and ask important questions about ethics and human impact of systems decisions.

Pictured here are some headlines as well as a contract from the City of Richmond. Y’all know we spent $1.5 million on a predictive policing system that will disproportionately harm citizens of color? And that earlier this month, City Council voted to allow Richmond and VCU PD’s to start sharing their data in that system?

The surveillance state abides. Technology facilitates.

I dare say these technologies are designed to bank on the fact that lawmakers don’t know what they’re looking at.

My theory is, in addition to holding deep prejudices, lawmakers are also deeply baffled by technology. The hard questions aren’t being asked, or they’re coming too late, and they’re coming from citizens who have to put themselves in harm’s way to do so.

Technophobia is another harmful element that’s emerged in the past decades. What would a world look like where technology is not a thing to shrug off as un-understandable, but is instead deftly co-designed to meet our needs, rather than licensed to our city for 1.5 million dollars? What if everyone knew that technology is not neutral?

Closing

This is some of the future I can see. I hope that it’s sparked new thoughts for you.

Let’s envision a future together. What has the light illuminated for you?

Thank you!

I’ve pulled out some of the topics we discussed and heavily edited/rearranged them for clarity.

Names in systems

Legal name vs. name of use

Let’s think about Facebook’s former Real name policy. Early on Mark Zuckerberg even said that having two names showed a lack of integrity.

The underlying assumption was that there’s one name that everybody always uses, and only people with malicious intend would do anything different. The notion that people are using different identities to “trick” others is also a common, harmful trope used to demonize and discredit trans people.

We now widely acknowledge that people are called different names in different circumstances either because of familial or professional relationships, different eras of their lives, different contexts, or because of a change in their gender identity.

People’s legal names may stay the same, but their names of use vary. That was the thing that got me thinking about trans-affirming systems design.

What would a world look like where trans folks actually see themselves in systems rather than simply accommodated? What if if they truly were affirmed and celebrated?

One way to do that is to allow people to say what their names are. There are very few contexts when we actually need folks’ full legal first names.

Not “edge cases”

Allowing for name flexibility is an example of a technology that helps a lot of different people. For example, of the 140 people on staff at our library, about a third of us are using names that are different from our full legal first name. People are going by middle names or by more familiar versions of first names, like Jimmy instead of James; or are using totally different names. While some people would see an errant name field as a minor annoyance, for other folks it’s a safety issue. It’s one change that’s a big quality of life increase for a lot of folks.

Binaries

Then there’s the gender binary. Computers run on binaries. As technologists we love the idea of ones and zeros, simplifying things when possible: off/on, yes/no; and frequently we do that with gender too. You’ve got a form asking for gender (typically unnecessarily) and there’s only two options.

Gendered stereotypes serve no one

We know full well that when we provide gender data it is often used to sell us things based gender stereotypes. When systems are actively reinforcing the gender binary, the result is reductive and uninspiring, and something that doesn’t reflect the lived gender experience of most people, whether they are trans or not.

Trans/cis binary

Another gender-related binary: either you’re trans or you’re cis. That’s a false binary. People’s gender identities change throughout their lives. There’s valid expressions of gender identity that are neither/nor, that are both/and, so to create that wall between trans and cis is really harmful for all, and cashes out as violence against people who don’t conform.

So many trans people I know don’t think they are “trans enough.” And so many cis people spend so much time trying to prove that they are manly or womanly enough. It’s exhausting.

Everybody has a gender

It’s important for folks who identify as cisgender to to think about and question their genders. You have gender(s)!

Ask yourself, How does my gender impact how I move through the world? How does it impact how I interact with people, and how I present myself, how I dress? It’s not just trans people that should be thinking about this. Just reflect on what your gender is, and how you do it. There’s so much richness there, even within within the cisgender and transgender buckets, there’s just so much.

Binaries create inequalities

Binaries in themselves can be violent. As humans, we categorize things as a survival mechanism so that we don’t have to spend all our energy processing every single sensory input.

At the same time, when we have categories that pit things against each other with a clear delineating line between, those differentiations create inequality.

One harmful binary at the root of American culture: either you’re white or you’re not, and you’re less than. The foundation of the U.S. is the exploitation and oppression of nonwhite people, Black and brown people. In technology, a binary might be “technical” and “non-technical” people. Those types of less-than/greater-than binaries occur across identities and sectors including gender.

Once you start to perceive all the binaries you can’t unsee them. Understanding how detrimental they are helps us understand how the systems we build can reject them and instead reflect the rich bouquet of lived human experience.

Making trans-affirming systems

Audit how how names are handled. Do you require a legal name for anything? If not, let people choose their name, let people update it. Does that name cascade to their username? Are they able to change a username? If I signed up 10 years ago and now I need to change my username, I want to bring over my entire history, am I able to do that?

Follow that up with a gender audit. Are you asking for gender anywhere? Why do you actually need it? Are you asking for people to indicate gender or a title? Add the gender-inclusive Mx. to the honorifics field and if possible make it optional because some folks are just not into it.

Images. If you’re using stock photography or other images on your site, do they represent diversity of lived experiences? Do you have folks who are not white, who are not young, who are disabled, who maybe aren’t conventionally gender presenting? Folks dressed in different types of clothing or with different gender presentation? There’s a few different open photo libraries on the web — the broadly gender spectrum collection comes to mind.

Content. Think about the the content of the web and how users are communicated with in the language that we use. Singular “they” instead of “he or she.”

More on my A List Apart article, Trans-inclusive design.

Closing

I recently read Design Justice and can’t recommend it highly enough. Constant learning is our life’s work. We can’t stay stagnant. We have to keep pushing ourselves, talking to people, and making sure that what we’re building is something that’s going to serve everybody.

I have read A List Apart for years and have always seen it as The Site for folks who make websites, so it is an honor to be published there.

I didn’t really have a template for a coming-out message, so ended up writing this post out to our staff intranet. I’m sharing it here in hopes that it helps some folks. Mileage certainly varies depending on where you work, but this FAQ may be helpful not only for folks coming out, but for people working alongside them.

My letter is below.

Disclaimer: Many of the answers in this FAQ won’t be true for all nonbinary folks, but it’s a jumping-off point if people want to start their own docs.

Thank you to the out trans and nonbinary librarians before me who helped me along the way, specifically Stephen Krueger, Max Bowman, char booth, María Matienzo, and Wen Nie Ng.

Good morning! I’m coming out as nonbinary

All –

Y’all have made VCU feel like home for me for the past 10 years. I wanted to share with you today that I am nonbinary, and use they/them pronouns. I have been out as nonbinary in my personal life for a while and I’m ready to bring that part of myself to my work life.

Why now?
I have been a member of the VCU community for a long time, I love working here, and I know this is a place where I can bring my whole self to work. I think my work and VCUL community are enriched when employees are authentically present. I think that all you kind folks at VCUL are open to welcoming me. I also think it’s important to be visible to folks in the community, especially students, who are trans or nonbinary.

What does that mean for me, your colleague?
I’m asking you to change how you talk to me and how you refer to me. Instead of using she or her pronouns to refer to me, you can use they and them. “Erin sent that message about their pronouns.” It’s kind of awkward at first but it gets easier with practice.

What can I call you?
– Addressing me: Erin, you, friend, colleague, erwhite, E-dubs, Mx. White (pronounced “mix”)…
– Referring to me: Erin, they, them, theirs, that person, friend, colleague, talented IT professional…

What shouldn’t I call you?
– Addressing me: Ms., Miss, lady, girl, woman, ma’am…
– Referring to me: she, her, he, him, it, Ms., Miss, lady, girl, woman…

What if I get it wrong?
It’s okay! If you catch yourself, correct and move on. What’s important is to try.

Will you correct me if I get it wrong?
It depends on the situation. If I remind you, it’s because I know we respect each other and both care about our relationship.

Can I correct others?
Yes, in the spirit of calling folks in rather than calling them out. We’re all in community with each other, and want to be generous with each other as we learn.

I don’t agree that I should use they/them pronouns for you.
I hope that you can respect me and honor how I am asking to be addressed, recognizing that inclusion is a core value at VCU, so we can work together. Another option is to just use my name instead of my pronouns.

That’s it! There are more resources on how to affirm nonbinary folks online if you are interested. Thank you for reading this far and thank you for your support.

Update April 15, 2019: This letter is included as part of Arley Cruther’s textbook Business Writing For Everyone: An Inclusive Guide to Writing in the Workplace.