I’ve been thinking a lot about the talk @SekaiFarai gave at #UXRConfAnywhere (I’ll be thinking about it for a long time) and I keep coming back to this:

We UXers spend so much energy lamenting our lack of power that we fail to interrogate the power we do have.

In her comments on @noamseg’s post-conference recap, Sekai said she “wanted researchers to leave feeling like what they needed was power within the organization.” Which is an aim I applaud. And yet...

UXers don’t deserve the influence we want if we’re unable or unwilling to accept the responsibilities of the power we already have.

And we have a lot of power. We represent users, frame the problems, design the solutions. And we in UXR too often rubber stamp those solutions with the imprimatur of “research” legitimacy—“we did user research.”

‘A seat at the table’ will not fix things. Systems assimilate. If we don’t do The Work, we’ll just end up recapitulating the same dynamics with a new vocabulary. We’ll fuck around and build the same shit, just calling exploitation “empathy.”

Sekai says she imagines a scenario where in 10 yrs, top tech companies are led by people who’ve spent a significant portion of their career leading research.

If UXR-led organizations are going to be different, one key aspect of that should be our reflexivity, our efforts to interrogate our power and praxis to better understand and address the needs of the communities we serve.

I said “the communities we serve.”