Designing for Social Change — How Design & Technology Can Better Support Young Adults
Designing for Social Change — How Design & Technology Can Better Support Young Adults
I have personally spent a lot of time doing some self-reflection, trying to process some of the societal pressures that I remember experiencing as a young adult. I’ve been taken aback by the numerous statistics I have heard recently, such as the rise in young adult suicide and how colleges are going out of business. These statistics are unsurprising to me, as I review my experience in high school and college. I believe that the coronavirus has been an opportunity to expose a lot of issues that weren’t being addressed. The bottom line is that education is getting expensive, but oftentimes, it’s not really necessary. It seems like a given that a lot of students continue on to college after high school, and it gives a lot of students a sense of entitlement and leaves room for poor behavior, affecting the small percentage of students who are actually there to pay for a good education. It leaves room for the bad and entitled students to create a hostile and unhealthy learning environment, and often, instead of addressing these issues, the universities sweep them under the rug due to fear that they will lose financial support if they don’t have large numbers of successful students.
These are all major systemic issues that can’t be addressed in one place as there is a lot of grey area on what’s going on, and different universities handle issues in different ways. However, I am really satisfied with the technological changes that are happening. So many college graduates go on to fields that are unrelated to what they majored in, and that’s left a lot of room for businesses to flourish by offering specific skillset training to individuals, usually at a much lower cost than college tuition. I, myself, as a UX Designer, have gone through various online learning platforms and have been very satisfied with my education as it gave me job-ready skills to turn my (relatively useless) undergraduate degree in political science and a graduate degree in linguistics, into a corporate asset — a designer with a very diverse and empathetic background. Some of the specific businesses that come to mind that have been revolutionary to current education have been communities like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and Codeacademy which offer accessible education for a relatively low-cost monthly subscription. I have also noticed that a lot of universities (likely in an effort to stay relevant) have started offering their courses on Coursera. I love seeing this because this forces students to consider if those classes are really what they want to be participating in and it, therefore, makes the learning environment healthier because everyone involved genuinely wants to be there.
I am really satisfied with the shift in perspective of education and I hope that it continues with more businesses popping up and offering various programs. I would also like to see society take a shift from highlighting the prestige of a college degree to having versatility in certifications. As pandemic restrictions start to loosen up, it would also be great to see some of these businesses have brick and mortar locations, where they could offer some courses to their clients in a community setting.
As for what we can do as designers? Well, a lot of things. Start-ups in the fintech industry, as well as the health industry, are booming. It’s evident that a lot of people have gotten involved in creating some opportunities and filling gaps, but the education industry hasn’t made quite as much noise. I would encourage us, as designers, to start formulating a problem statement based on some of these statistics. It’s clear that the need and the want for the opportunity in this arena are there, so why aren’t we moving in that direction? Of course, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, but we, as user experience designers, have the opportunity to look at our market and internally shift our companies or our freelance work to start fulfilling a need in a seemingly necessary market.
Additionally, we could share what we know already. We could volunteer our time and energy to mentor others who are up and coming in the technology space. We could offer to publicly speak at universities or high schools where the talent pool is still impressionable, we could start explaining to people what it is that we do. My own parents are unsure of what I do. Most people I talk to have no idea what a UX Designer is. I don’t think there’s any hope for them (haha 😂), but there’s certainly hope for the younger generation.
Most importantly, being informed about the design process, and sharing that information is probably one of the most useful steps to take. This is similar to the previous statement, but our younger generation is spending a lot of time online. This is a great opportunity for us to discuss our design processes on social media platforms, write blogs, post TikToks, etc. Anything to continue putting valuable content for the younger generation to consume. Instagram is filled with women who look a certain way, filling young women’s minds with a toxic ambition that they can’t be successful if they don’t live up to an impossible beauty standard. And for men, we continue to enforce the notion of toxic masculinity that ends up hurting everyone. We can never cancel the noise of toxicity in society, but we CAN contribute more valuable content instead.
Our system is begging for a change. We can either stand by and allow things to stay the way they are (and progressively get worse), or we can do what we do best — fight for our users and start to fill in some gaps.
Designing for Social Change — How Design & Technology Can Better Support Young Adults was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.