You might be doing tech wrong, says new book

Offensive face filters, algorithms with built-in bias, sexist apps: not having a diverse team has come at a cost for companies like Snapchat, Facebook and many more.

That is one of many tech-industry-focused takeaways from Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s 2016 book, Design for Real Life (coauthored with Ohio-based designer Eric Mayer). Now Wachter-Boettcher is turning the tables to examine, this time under a solo byline, some examples of exclusive design processes and how they end up impacting non-tech folks.

The book, published by WW Norton, went live today.

I wrote a book about how toxic, biased culture gets built into tech products. It's out 10/10, but preorders are👌💯. https://t.co/KPVRQmPIpS pic.twitter.com/FR69lPKB9Z

— Sara Wachter-Boettcher (@sara_ann_marie) October 4, 2017

“I realized there was a growing appetite for people in the not tech ecosystem to peek behind the curtain,” the author told Technical.ly.

Wachter-Boettcher, a principal at UX consulting firm Rare Union and Philly resident since 2012, can list off a few tech misfires on command: Snapchat’s “Anime” mask that amounted to a caricature of an Asian person, FaceApp’s “hotness” filter that bleached users’ skin and Apple’s health app that claimed to track major all health indicators except for menstrual cycles.

“As tech becomes central to our lives it has the power to define norms,” said the author.

The book is more diagnosis than solution due its general public focus. “I don’t pretend to tell to tell the tech industry how they can solve everything,” the writer said. “I don’t think you should be a computer scientist to understand things like why an algorithm can be biased. Those kind of things deserve to be in the public conversation more than they’ve been.”

But push the consultant to yield a diagnosis and she’ll call it like it is:

“There are profound problems in tech culture and the entire model of how people are funded,” the author said. “It keeps the same people in charge. You need a more diverse workforce and more value placed on what the consequences of decisions are.”

(Lack of inclusive policies have led to what organizer Briana Morgan calls a pervasive sexual harassment problem in the tech ecosystem, Philly included.)

A launch gathering for the book is happening tonight at HeadHouse Books.