The Intersection of Sustainable Design and Inclusive Technology

Explore the synergy between sustainability and accessibility in digital design with our insightful guest, Alexis, Senior Product UX Designer at IKEA. We promise a rich discussion on the shared goals of enhancing life and the planet, while tackling the challenge of fragmented reporting under the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Alexis shares groundbreaking strategies on integrating sustainable practices into digital technology, stressing the need for collaboration between professionals to ensure accessibility's material impact is both recognized and effectively communicated.

Shifting focus to the power of optimism, we discuss redefining societal value beyond monetary terms. Drawing inspiration from compelling books like "What If We Get It Right," we advocate for moving away from pessimism to embrace hopeful innovation. Discover how sustainable and accessible practices can not only improve efficiency and creativity but also lead to better, more affordable products. We wrap up by emphasizing the importance of sustaining conversations on accessibility across multiple platforms, aiming for a long-term impact that transcends today's discussion. Join us for an inspiring narrative that challenges you to rethink value in design and business practices.

Chapters

• 0:01 Aligning Sustainability and Accessibility in Business
• 15:31 Embracing Sustainability and Accessibility
• 28:35 Sustaining Conversations on Accessibility

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:01

Hello and welcome to AXI Chat. I'm delighted that we're joined today by Alexis. Alexis is a Senior Product UX Designer at IKEA, a small niche furniture retailer that you might not have heard of. So I came across Alexis via LinkedIn because Alexis was happily riding one of my personal hobby horses, which is sustainability and accessibility. So it's a real area of interest for me how we can align accessibility with sustainability principles and what that means in terms of including people, sdgs, et cetera, but also the approaches that that allows you to take within organizations.

Neil Milliken: 0:51

So I was really excited to see someone that I'd never met and so therefore had never preached at also getting really interested in the topic. So, of course, then I decided we had to meet, and so we started talking and I was like you have to come on the show. So welcome, alexis, it's great to have you here. Antonio and I are delighted to have you. Deborah is off visiting a disaster zone. She's gone out to help family and friends after the hurricane in Georgia, so it's just the two of us today, but we're really glad to have you with us. So can you tell me a little bit more about your title and the work that you're doing at IKEA?

Alexis Oh: 1:38

Yeah, my day job at IKEA. I'm a product UX designer and essentially I'm looking at the end-to-end experiences of customers. So I'm customer-facing. I look at different touch points the app, the web, the kiosk and generally try to have a more holistic outlook on how people shop and buy things and experience and go about their day-to-day in the shop. You know, go about their day-to-day in the shop, but I also, at the same time, in the office, co-lead a movement or a working group on digital sustainability. So this is more grassroots employee-facing.

Alexis Oh: 2:20

Our mission is essentially to reduce the environmental impact of the digital technology that we use by empowering coworkers to think sustainably while thinking digitally. This is the catchphrase, the thing we repeat and the thing we're trying to improve on. Then I tend to do a lot of things so this might go on for a while Outside of work and the company. I also co-curate with a bunch of amazing people, the Climate UX group with Rosenfeld, and that's what I was writing about or at least the context I was writing in in the article that you looked at, neil that we had a panel on sustainability and accessibility. Navigating sustainability and accessibility, because to me it's quite obvious that they're both very similar. They share the same ultimate goal, which is around the betterment of people and planet, and they're facing similar blockers, challenges in the business context. So, yeah, very interesting topic.

Antonio Santos: 3:19

So and like on that topic, do you think that companies see and are able to seize that opportunity of bringing the two together? Or there are still a little bit, you know, two family members who are not really talking with each other as much as they should?

Alexis Oh: 3:38

I think it depends on the company, the size and a lot of things right.

Alexis Oh: 3:42

But what I have noticed across different companies just by chatting with people, is that there is a sort of hesitation in not wanting to conflate the two or not wanting to mix the two just because of how difficult it has been to push accessibility work, to get funding for accessibility programs, and even though to me they are very similar in the sense that at the end of the day, from a digital point of view, they both contribute to good software design, good software development, which has the ultimate goal of software is to help people, in my opinion, to make life better for us, for the planet, et cetera, in to make life better for us, for the planet, et cetera.

Alexis Oh: 4:28

But from a business point of view they are quite separate because they have different parameters to get to a point of success. So I do think that people are a bit careful, not wanting to mix the two, one on one hand not wanting to dilute the focus to get to a certain place, but on the other hand wanting to separate almost the eggs in a basket. So if one goes on, at least the other doesn't. So that's the kind of sentiment that I'm seeing across the board.

Neil Milliken: 4:52

So I think this is really interesting because there there is always, within areas of expertise, a desire to sort of keep the precious thing to ourselves and even within our own organization, our accessibility. Folks don't wish to be subsumed under the sustainability topic in case they lose relevance, right. So I get that, but there is still still, I think, value to be had in aligning approaches, um, talking about commonalities where there are shared goals and shared requirements, um, and also helping to influence sustainability and CSR to get better at doing stuff around accessibility, because this is something that large corporations, especially in Europe, have to report on CSR. There's the corporate CSRD, which is the reporting directive, uh, csrd, which is the the reporting directive, and that is all framed around uma framework of things. Another acronym, esrs, which is the european environmental reporting standards, and those do have areas where disability is mentioned, but it's very fragmented.

Neil Milliken: 6:27

So some of the stuff that we're doing as organizations is looking at materiality and you look at sustainability in terms of materiality.

Neil Milliken: 6:36

But you also look at the impact of inaccessibility in terms of materiality and you decide whether or not inaccessibility is material in the context of your customers or your employees or end users, etc.

Neil Milliken: 6:55

And I would always argue yes, it is material, it does have an impact and therefore it needs to be reported.

Neil Milliken: 7:02

But the frameworks for all of this reporting now make it quite challenging to do that in a coherent way, because they're not really focused on accessibility or inclusion. They're focused on they've come from an environmental point of view. So there's a need for us, as practitioners around accessibility, to engage with the sustainability professionals and give our input, because at the moment, what it's doing is, yes, for companies that have never reported on accessibility, disability related stuff, it's asking them to think about it. But for those that are more mature and had a process for reporting, it's actually sort of fragmented all of that and there is a tendency to then just go and report on the things. So you fill out the bits that tick the boxes that enable you to say we've complied with the reporting standard, rather than being coherent. So I think that I would like to encourage at least dialogue between the two groups so that we can be mutually supportive and bring about those shared goals of inclusion and making things that are better for society and that are more useful for everyone.

Antonio Santos: 8:22

So I think it makes sense to bring a kind of a dilemma to the conversation. Is, you know, you can say no, this product, this solution is sustainable, but then well, it's not really accessible. So people with disabilities need to choose a non-sustainable solution, because that one works for us. So I think it's even from a perspective of software, or even from a perspective of physical products right, oh, absolutely, I mean.

Neil Milliken: 8:51

there's good examples of that, plastic straws being one.

Alexis Oh: 8:54

Or paper straws covered in plastic.

Neil Milliken: 8:57

Well, yes, that too, because then that's just virtue signaling and failing to meet the requirements. Yeah, good point.

Alexis Oh: 9:08

Yeah, but it's all sort of related right. At least I think this happens when you start segmenting the different initiatives, the different goals, the different groups, and each one of them comes with language of their own, so you end up with jargon that is specific to a certain community. But if you abstract all of it, we are essentially talking about the same thing. And a lot of what we talk about with accessibility, with sustainability, is essentially good software. With accessibility, with sustainability, it's essentially good software. And a lot of what you talk about with good software good product design, good digital products is good business or good processes, and you know where do you draw the line. So I find that there is a shared goal. If you zoom out enough, we are working towards the same thing.

Alexis Oh: 9:52

But the measurements so the policies that come in with csrd and things like it's good to force people to measure, to force companies to measure, because that's the foundational bit, that's how we can compare, that's how we can measure our progress and that's how we keep people accountable. Um, but for every sort of quant focus that we have, there has to be a bigger picture, sort of aligning it. What is that, what is that for, what is it toward. And I do feel that sometimes, in the race to get all these things in place for whatever act is coming up, there is a sort of missed opportunity to take a step back and look at a total system, right, the system of like, what exactly are we trying to move? At the end of the day, if we measure all these things, what happens once we get all the measurement? What changes? And I think that sort of questions. Those questions apply both to accessibility, to sustainability and just good practices in general yeah, I think we we're often measuring outputs and not thinking about outcomes.

Neil Milliken: 11:03

And obviously, when people started on the journey of making the standards and putting in place the legislation, they did intend outcomes. But along the way, as you get into the granular process of creating those standards and determining how people report, then you start to be looking at the outputs and you can kind of get distracted by some of that stuff. So I do think that you're making a very good point. So, as you're connecting all of these dots, how do you apply some of that within your own organization? Is it grassroots? Are you finding ways to embed it?

Alexis Oh: 11:45

So with the digital sustainability movement it is grassroots at the moment Together with my co-conspirator Tai, we're both sort of trying to find ways to bring awareness to the topic. I think that's, first and foremost, connecting the dots for people, but also trying to find proof points. I think and this goes back to the measurement thing it's really difficult to convince someone to do a thing that seems like it's this gigantic behemoth effort. It's a huge thing, such as climate change, which is essentially any sustainability movement is towards climate change right, it's a really big thing to tackle, um.

Alexis Oh: 12:26

So if you're going to bring that, I think, to any business, regardless of the size, you do have to speak the language, you do have to understand.

Alexis Oh: 12:34

How does it benefit them?

Alexis Oh: 12:36

And it's not just, I think, a lot of, especially sustainability. In particular, we talk about cost savings, so the operational costs, the energy efficiency, the savings you get from reducing the carbon emissions and et cetera, et cetera. But we don't talk about growth or revenue growth, which I think is a missed opportunity, because if you look at how accessibility has approached the same hurdle, it's about the expansion of the total adjustable market. It's that if you were to make your services and products more accessible, you would reach x more people and therefore have this whole new, you know, business area to look into. I mean, I do think that's where learning and bringing the two together is really valuable, because you start to see where one movement fails in something and you can pick up and try a different method and the learnings can be recycled across the board. So I'm really hoping there's more coming together, more convening of these two movements together, because I do think the end goal is still the same and do you feel that any resistances from, or any point of resistance from, any of the groups?

Alexis Oh: 13:53

well, I think in the beginning we talked about the groups wanting to keep their precious thing and I I think that comes out of the place of, you know, wanting the best for their movement and not wanting to have more noise, because typically when you open up whatever discussion and you you turn into a group discussion or a brainstorm, you have differing opinions and that does it feels like it's slowing down progress, but in the grand scheme of things, it's actually clarifying and including a lot of different perspectives. So, yeah, I do see blockers in that sense that because there is especially in sustainability with this climate change. It's not you can't really ignore it and every day in the news that is being played up, especially of recent date we've seen with hurricanes it's. There are a lot of very real things happening that remind you of this looming doom. It's hard to ignore and so I think that creates pressure and people are very nervous and anxious. I'm one of them. I I do think I'm really anxious about this. I keep feeling that I can do more, I should do more, but I think if we're not careful and we're not approaching it with some sort of calmness, uh, you might end up reacting and that's where the fear comes in and that protecting of the precious things, that I have an idea of how I'm going to fix this and I must work really hard to get it in that place and if I let someone in they might take it away. So there is a bit of that, I do think, and that is a blocker. But at the same time I want to plug a few different things out there.

Alexis Oh: 15:31

I do see books and writings of switching the narrative into something more positive. So there's a book by I don't remember her name exactly, but what, if we Get it Right, is the title professor, very well-spoken, probably you can edit in a show notes somewhere Great book, just really spinning the message into something more positive. And then there's a similar sort of another book by Pela, I think, another professor at Utrecht University, and it's from pessimism to promise. So both books you can see sort of take a doom and gloom message and spin it into something a little bit more hopeful. And I think hope is a very powerful thing at this point, because a lot of what we're struggling with, a lot of the blockers, are people process driven. They're not actually. It's not that there are no technical challenges, it's not that there are no scientific challenges. They are, but we're not making progress as quickly and as efficiently as we can because of the people dynamics and that's part of life and I don't think we can or should ignore it just because we're talking about sustainability or accessibility.

Alexis Oh: 16:41

I think that's part and parcel of it all.

Neil Milliken: 16:43

So I also read a book called the Right Kind of Wrong I think it was Business Book of the year last year and and that was really um, talking about learning from failure and and I think that quite often we're so afraid of failing that we don't start doing yeah, um, and and so there is that there's a lot to be learned from not getting it right, and we shouldn't be ashamed of not getting it right so long as we don't keep repeating the same mistakes which, as a society, sometimes we do. I also taking on board your points about sort of the failures, of the failures of of the different areas, of the different movements. So you're saying, you know, um, the sustainability movement hasn't really sold growth. Well, that's partly because it's actually considering things like degrowth. Yeah, you know, how do we? How do we minimize what we consume and maybe minimize. So I think really what we need to be doing is reconceptualizing value, because at the moment, we think about value through ever more consumption and growing and being bigger, whereas if we find other ways to monetize things and or even to recognize value, because money isn't always the thing that's most valuable.

Neil Milliken: 18:09

You know, you, you hear of these people that win the lottery, um, that go back to being pretty miserable quite quickly, because there's a reason, you know they. They have this amazing life moment and suddenly everything's available to them. That wasn't before, so they're. They're briefly happy, but they're, then that their happiness levels pretty much go back to whatever level of happiness they were before. So, um, so, just chasing the money, I don't think really makes a great deal of sense. So we maybe need to redefine what. What value is for society, um, and and I think that you know, actually you get more pleasure, more happiness, from giving than you do from receiving in terms of of these things. So I think that there's there's things that we can do, and I think that conceptual frameworks are really helpful in changing how people approach things, which is why I was really keen on the sustainability frameworks and decarbonization and so on from an accessibility point of view.

Neil Milliken: 19:17

But then you need the proof point as well, and I think that the proof point comes when you can actually say well, good, accessible code and making good products is also more energy efficient code, and a great example of that was the work that we did with a small company called Equivalent Design that make accessible, scalable vector graphics.

Neil Milliken: 19:44

Normally, if you're creating a website and you're doing it for multiple screen sizes and so on. You end up with lots of different versions of the same image, whereas an SVG is one image, and you're doing all of this with code rather than pixels, and you can also then input all of the accessibility requirements in there, so you can select things. So it's great for complex infographics, which are generally you would make accessible by doing a really convoluted description. Now you can actually navigate your way around them and at the same time, it's a tiny file size, so you're making it accessible. You're reducing the amount of server space and therefore you know planetary resources that are burnt, and I'd like to see more of these sort of connected examples to to show the communities yes, you can have your precious thing, but our values are aligned and when we do talk to each other, we can actually do something that benefits both communities.

Alexis Oh: 20:52

Yeah, and I do think there is space for creativity in the synergy of the two areas. And I think one thing that is a similarity across both is the perception that doing both is, you know, it makes your experience or your software or your product a little bit more boring or it limits you in certain ways. I think that it does come out, this conversation, but at the same time, you know, some of the more creative solutions that you can see are born out of constraints. So if we just take a step back from all of this, it is really you know, how do you prompt the right sort of reaction from people across the board? And it is this thing where, yes, if we turn, I think the vector example is a really good one.

Alexis Oh: 21:48

It is essentially about making something more efficient, and by doing that it makes it also accessible, also sustainable in certain ways, and it's cheaper, more affordable, et cetera, et cetera. But the common word is it's efficient, it's good, and I think if we can sort of align that, yes, we want to do good, we want to make good products, we want to create good experiences, we want to have good software. That's the first line, and once you've agreed on that, you know what defines good. I think that's a conversation that should be had, and to me, sustainability, accessibility these are all pillars of what good means yes, quality, it's a you know, it's.

Neil Milliken: 22:32

You know, accessibility is a quality issue. Sustainability is a quality issue. You're building things that are, uh, well resolved, that hopefully give people good experiences, that don't do too much damage to the planet that we're on and maybe hopefully at some point start looking at repairing the planet that we're on.

Antonio Santos: 22:57

And I think we can go back to a topic that we talked on AccessShot a few times. That is about pollution. So if you are saying something like, oh, I'm not able to, you know, accessibility doesn't let me to be creative enough, and so in the end, the outcome you are just polluting the world with another digital solution and the same applies oh, I don't really know, sustainability is limiting my creativity. In the end, it's going to end up in the same scenario In the end, we are polluting the world under the banner that your creativity is being limited.

Alexis Oh: 23:37

This is a really nice analogy, bringing it to the real world, because if you look at the problems across both, it stems from the behavior or the mindset of people. Right, overconsumption is a big problem that leads to a lot of waste, but it also leads to the intense productization of a lot of things. And the same with digital. And I think, if you look at where we've come with physical recycling of things, we no longer say things like you know, I recycle my plastic, therefore I'm saving X amount of CO2. You don't say I turn off my lights, therefore I save this, I use less water, therefore you just do it because it's ingrained in your day-to-day habits, it's ingrained in the way you are and the way you're being conscious and mindful about things. So I think for me, it's the same with sustainability digital sustainability. It's about being conscious about these things, and it's similar with accessibility. It's about being mindful of other people, that you're not everybody, you're not the norm, and actually the word norm.

Alexis Oh: 24:43

Have a think about what that means. Like who gets to define it? Where are we putting it? Is it the same around the world? These conversations, I feel, are becoming more um standard. I am seeing them crop up more and more, but the higher we can lift them in terms if we go back to businesses right the higher we can lift them. The more executives these three people are having these conversations as well, I think the more we'll see movements and funding opening up, uh, in areas where we need them to so I, I think that the c-suite, certainly in many of the organizations that I see and deal with, have grasped the the concepts around sustainability.

Neil Milliken: 25:24

They've understood that they need to do it. They've made commitments. Now we are seeing some backsliding on some of those commitments and, um, and so this is this then becomes about. This is the sustainability of sustainability, because, um, businesses are driven by shareholder value and investors and the stock market valuation. So it's how, you know, finding ways to sort of support that and and and again.

Neil Milliken: 25:56

This is one of my hobby horses is talking.

Neil Milliken: 25:59

I like to talk about making good money from doing good things, and so we need to find ways to make it more profitable to do things that are good for society and good for the planet than things that tear down resources that are exclusionary, that are, you know, setting people against each other, you know, um.

Neil Milliken: 26:20

So changing those business models and finding ways to demonstrate that you can make good money from, from doing this stuff, I think is is really important, and there are, you know, people that have been thinking about this. So I, I mean, I really like um donut economics, yeah. So it's a, it's a really good book because it doesn't just think about sort of sustainability. It's thinking about the impact of economic models and how sustainability. It's thinking about the impact of economic models and how those then drive behaviors not just within business but within society as well, and I think that that it's those kind of things that hopefully can can bring about long-term change. To challenge for us is whether or not we've got time, the luxury of time, to allow for some of these changes. Antonio, I see you're itching to get in here.

Antonio Santos: 27:16

No, you're talking about. I tend to spend some time looking at company shareholder calls from different organizations around the world and they are entities who are really doing some very interesting work on sustainability, where they do spend the time and the energy and the money to create frameworks to explain why they are doing sustainability, why they aim and they're able to explore and explain to the shareholders why that journey brings value. So I think what they need is to find ways to inject accessibility in those frameworks and make sure that the shareholders also understand the importance of accessibility the importance of accessibility. Sometimes we see some very small nuances where they say that they are working on accessibility but we don't really see the effort that they are already doing on establishing those frameworks for sustainability.

Neil Milliken: 28:18

So, yeah, I think we're definitely lagging behind the curve in terms of mind share and communication share when it comes to this topic, and so finding the way and co-opting some of those communications I think is really important. We're at the end of our half an hour already. I could actually go on for ages, but I am about to be chucked out of my hotel room, so we do need to thank our friends and sponsors Amazon for keeping us on air and my clear text for keeping us captioned. Alexis, it's been a great pleasure. I really look forward to us continuing this discussion um on social media during access chat, but also, I think, for the longer term and taking this discussion out and keeping it going and making it sustainable across all of the channels. Really appreciate your thought leadership here, thank you thank you thanks.