A series of questions to ask on any design project:
- What are my lenses?
- Am I just confirming my assumptions, or am I challenging them?
- What details here are unfair? Unverified? Unused?
- Am I holding onto something that I need to let go of?
- What’s here that I designed for me? What’s here that I designed for other people?
- What would the world look like if my assumptions were wrong?
- Who might disagree with what I’m designing?
- Who might be impacted by what I’m designing?
- What do I believe?
- Who’s someone I’m nervous to talk to about this?
- Is my audience open to change?
- What am I challenging as I create this?
- How can I reframe a mistake in a way that helps me learn?
- How does my approach to this problem today compare to how I might have approached this one year ago?
- If I could learn one thing to help me on this project, what would that one thing be?
- Do I need to slow down?
RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.
A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.
Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.
Little interventions for designers in the form of questions designed to challenge assumptions. Kind of like Brian Eno’s oblique strategies.