Christina Mallon: Full Episode

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M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y. M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y. E-A-S-R. AI, AI, AI.

It's Machine Learning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. Today, an episode that matters to every single person. Seriously, if you lead product or are a CMO or anywhere in the org chain, you need to take notes and share this one around. Christina Mallen, our guest, is a designer, advocate, and authority on designing for the disabled. Fully 1 in 5, 20%, of the population self-identify as having either a cognitive or physical disability. Between those who are disabled by the products they are offered, their friends and family, and everyone who serves, does business, or wants to create products that work for these individuals, well, you can see that this matters to every one of us. Saying much more would be gilding the lily, We have more about Christina and upcoming episodes of Machine Yearning from this week's VOICE Summit later in the pod. Let's go.

How are you?

Doing well.

Tell us what you do for a living.

So I do many things for a living, but really it all focuses on inclusive design. During the day, I work at Possible Advertising in their inclusive design group, helping brands just be more inclusive in their marketing. And then at night, I help run an incubator at Parsons called Open Style Lab. And Open Style Lab takes multifunctional teams, product designers, fashion designers, occupational therapists to create a design for someone with a disability focusing on fashion.

And that's how we met.

And that is how we met. Lovely Open Style Lab.

It was such a special day. And can you tell people why you're there?

I'm there because about 8 years ago, I started to notice that a few of my fingers couldn't type as well. And over an 8-year span, Both my arms and fingers became completely paralyzed due to a motor neuron disease that no doctors have been able to diagnose.

Can you tell me the stat again? 'Cause it really surprised me. You said, "How many people in the world do you think are disabled?" And how many is it?

It's one-fifth of the world identifies as having a disability. And I think it's probably even larger. But the fact that not everyone reports that they have a disability, makes that one-fifth, but it's still such a large number and it shocks everyone every time I say it.

Including me.

Yes.

And when they self-identify with a disability, what can that mean? What are we talking about here?

We're talking from everything to physical and cognitive. So really a large span of different types of disabilities. But at the end of the day, they struggle with a task due to either physical or cognitive function that they have.

And now, how do you describe your mission around design and how you want to impact the world?

Yeah, I think that I look at what makes me disabled, and it's the world. It's the products around me didn't think about me when they were created. So what I try to do is to create products that think about people with disabilities first. Because if all products are made for me in mind, I won't be disabled anymore.

When you say start with accessibility, how do I do that? How does the design process start, and where do you get inspiration from to know what's right?

Yeah, so what I do is I try to do a lot of prototyping and user testing with people with multiple disabilities. My disability only affects my arm. So I'm not going to be saying, okay, this is perfect for people with disabilities, this product, because it works for me. I try to ask my friends that have vision impairments or my friends in the seated position or my friends with autism and get their feedback on a product. And I do a lot of prototyper— prototyping and user testing to make sure that I'm covering some of the largest disabilities and getting their kind of check before I'm saying a product is okay. And that's what we try to do at Open Style Lab, is that we teach our fellows to use this type of user testing and prototyping so that when they go off to their full-time jobs and they're creating products, so that is thought of when they are creating their own product that will touch millions of people.

Can you tell us about a product you saw designed at Open Style Labs that just really blew you away or that is a good example of accessibility-first thinking?

So I could say I actually participated in Open Style Lab and that's how I found it. So I was one of their clients with a disability. And one really interesting thing that they created was there was a girl with autism and she would pick at the linings of her shirt, so all of the seams, and the shirt would come undone. Every day her mom had to get her a new t-shirt. That's so expensive. And then also she didn't know as her daughter was becoming a woman, she was ripping her shirt off in public. So a lot of the times they couldn't go to things. And the students were able to create and work with some design firms to create a fabric that was unrippable. And then also use some of the girls' drawings in her shirt so that she wouldn't want to rip up her drawings. So they just kind of used and understand how autism worked and how to help avoid her picking at the scenes by using better fabrics and knowing that she won't want to rip up her designs. And it ended up with a beautiful product that allows her to go out with confidence.

Do you feel like we have an opportunity right now at this moment in time with these new voice platforms and messaging platforms that are green grass, nothing's really been figured out yet, it's new territory for brands and people, that you must start accessibility first?

100%. I think in anything that you do, the more it's focused on the user, the product is always better. You know, more minds than one is always better. And I think that starting with accessibility and making sure that is kind of a rule number one will make a better product for all. So if we look at the typewriter that was created by someone so that he could send love letters and they had a disability, he was blind, and a typewriter allowed for that. And you look at Siri, that was created for people with disabilities, and now that's a product for everyone. So if you look at some of the best products that were created with people with disabilities in mind, and now it benefits everyone, we need to look at things like that. And that's how we justify spending, you know, the extra couple thousands to make your website accessible or to have someone with a disability on your team and making those accommodations because they could come up with some of the best products. And if you think it like that, it makes the extra expense worth it.

What's an example that you specifically are excited about that you've seen someone really do well accessibility first?

Hmm.

Let me think about that one.

You're like, "None, these assholes." I know, I know.

I'm like, it's so—

What's the last thing you interacted with that you thought, "Wow, they really thought through the accessibility on this"?

That's a very, very good question. Um, maybe a lot of brand new buildings. I was just at Brookfield Place and it was fully accessible. Even every single door, um, and everything that— from just like reaching items, they were put lower on the shelves. Maybe that, but I don't know, not everyone's thinking about it.

Did you catch that? Christina Mallen says it's obvious: Brands are not thinking about how they make themselves useful and try to win the business and loyalty of persons who were made disabled by the lack of inclusion offered by these products. How is your company or organization doing? When was the last time you asked?

How, how, how.

If you're one of the thousands who are attending the VOICE Summit in Newark this week, you can meet Christina. She's sitting down with ASSIST's Shane Mac this Wednesday at 3:30 in the Tiernan Lecture Hall. The conversation will be loaded with insight about the ways technology and commerce and culture have to live together to serve more people better. You'll hear more about this in a few when Christina describes her technology life. Got an idea for a guest you'd like to hear on Machine Yearning? Let us know. DM us @assist on Twitter. And now, more with Christina Mallen.

Can you walk me through your technology life? Like, what do you use and how do you use it?

I would not be able to thrive without technology. It evens the playing field for people with disabilities. You know, when I wake up, I use Alexa to find out what the weather is like and to find out the news because it's hard for me to access my phone or even grab a newspaper and flip through it or read a book. So I have Amazon Alexa reading books to me. So really how I take in content is so important, be when it's voice activated, because I won't be able to learn things without that since I can't really type. And then I get into work and I use Dragon Dictate, which is dictation software, and that allows me to have a job because everyone commutes via email. Some other technology is how I feed myself. I use an OB Robot, which is a tiny robotic bowl and cup that feeds me based off of push tabs on the side of it. So it gives me information, and then also I'm able to eat. And then there's just tiny devices like magnets and zippers in my clothing that are allowing me to dress myself. So really all of this technology from magnets to different coding and voice automation allows me to live as a person rather than a vegetable in a hospital somewhere.

Did voice change a lot for you?

Yes, very much so. And I think voice will allow me to thrive even longer. And do more as the technology of voice becomes better and better over time.

What's missing? What needs to be better?

I think that some activities can be done by voice, but not all of them. So I would like to see being able to, you know, cook or talk to my microwave or talk to my clothing and my clothing dress itself. And that's one thing that I'm really interested in. I study a lot via my nonprofit Open Style Lab is how can we have self-dressing clothes that dress you using your voice?

And say more about that.

Yeah.

So I would love to be able to talk to my pants and say, pull up pants, and the pants just shoot up. Now we've really been able to see if we can do that with air. And that's something Open Style Lab has explored. But I would love just to talk to my clothing and it dress me, or having a robot being able to do that would be amazing. And doing that all via your voice.

There's so many things I've never thought about.

It's very meta.

Are there any other technologies that have fundamentally changed things for you?

I think Dragon Dictate has really changed a lot for people with disabilities, but then people who don't type as well or type as quickly that are just adapting to the technology age. I see a lot of people in their 50s and 60s that depend on it very much so to kind of help them compete in this internet technology fast world. I would say that has the most effect on my life, but Things like Uber, all of the on-demand apps allow me to get around New York City that's not accessible. So I really look to those, like food ordering apps since I can't cook myself. So I think apps have been very helpful for me to outsource all the tasks I can't do. I haven't been in an actual store in forever and bought something. It's— everything's via app and it's really changed my life. And I've lived alone for the last 4 years and because of that I'm able to.

That's incredible. How are you thinking about the future of mobile interfaces? And specifically, I think an area of the phone that many people might not go is the accessibility area, but they've done a ton of work here. And I'm curious, you know, what that area looks like for you or people, you know, and how that evolves in the future.

I think that when I look at one of the best accessibility offerings from a phone, I think it's really the screen reader. I have two guy friends that are blind and they live alone in the city and they live a very, very full life, a very successful life. Their company is called the Two Blind Brothers and they run the entire company along with their partner, Court. And they use their phone for everything. They really don't use a laptop too much. And they use their phone because of all of the accessibility offerings that Apple has really thought about from the beginning. And from just zooming in to— it does— reads the text and puts it out in voice for things that are really small because many mobile interfaces are not screen reader friendly. So most people with disabilities cannot use them. So I think it's very important, and why I stick with Apple over Samsung is because of the accessibility features within the mobile.

Do you use Siri?

I use Siri a lot. It's so, so helpful. If you think about a lot of— I type with my feet, and that takes a little longer than typing with your hands. And Siri saves me a few seconds every single interaction, and that really adds up. So it was really wonderful when the phone changed and I was able to use Siri without having to touch the phone, because at one point you had to touch the phone to enable Siri.

Can you say more about you type with your feet? Because if you say that statement, and I think many people's head listening as well as my head, I'm like, I don't know how to type with my feet. What is the process like? How does that even work?

So what I use is an iPad. So I use— everything has to be touchscreen when I'm typing. I just can't use a regular hard plastic keyboard, and I just have to take my shoes off and I put the iPad on the ground and I type with both feet. And it's a little bit slower than being able to type with your hands on a keyboard on a desk. But it gets the job done. I use it a lot when I'm outdoors, given that all of the noise around me doesn't allow for the microphone to pick up what I'm saying via voice. So at home I use voice, but in public areas I use my feet to text on an iPad on the floor.

Is there a world in which voice specifically in public settings because it's, it's hard to hear. It interrupts your friends. When the camera in the phone now is so good at seeing your face, do you see a world where it's more gesture or lip reading, or it allows you to actually use voice without speaking?

Definitely. I think lip reading is definitely an option. Another really interesting thing is a lot of the eye tracking technology. That has not been perfected yet, but Microsoft is doing a very, very good job to make eye tracking a little bit faster because there's a big delay when you use your eyes. But I think, you know, lip reading would be really a great, amazing solve to allow me to function better in public places when it comes to communicating because Everyone's just talking to their phone now, and I can't do that, so sometimes I do get a little frustrated in public places when I can't communicate or communicate fast. Shane Mac.

Voice without sound, lip reading, gesture, eye movement as the new controller. Yep, it's coming. It's obvious how many design and inclusion inclusion innovations will be needed to make these happen, and the millions who will be better served as a result. This week, Machine Yearning is at the Voice Summit, where we'll be speaking with so many people who are at the absolute forefront of this revolution. In the coming weeks, we'll be featuring the Mars Agency's Bree Glaser, Deborah Dahl from Conversational Technologies, and Yext CEO Howard Lerman. So make sure you subscribe to Machine Learning so you don't miss these interviews from the VOICE Summit. And while you're at it, give us a review or rate us. It helps other folks who care about these topics discover the pod. Now more with Christina Mallen.

One of the things that you were teaching me on Saturday was the language of disability.

Yes.

And I think that is something I had honestly hadn't thought about enough. After being with you for the whole day, I feel like it's all I thought about the next day and I see it everywhere. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the phrases or language we use that we shouldn't, or we need to upgrade our language or update our language, and how to be more aware of that?

Sure. I think that not a lot of people know the exact way to talk about disabilities, so they end up just really saying what they hear. So one example is when people call me a disabled person, I'd rather be called a person with a disability because I don't want the word disabled to define me. And that's one thing that I have, you know, really seen that people don't understand makes a big impact on how people identify themselves with a disability. And then also wheelchair-bound is a word that I try not to use. I say really in the seated position, because a lot of people with, you know, that use wheelchairs, they don't use them all the time. And saying you're bound to something has such a negative connotation with it. Let's just say in the seated position, and that takes away the stigma, because disabled and wheelchair-bound, they have a stigma associated with them. So we need to change the words that we use. So that people just think differently.

One of the ones you told me, um, I think her name was April, she said if you're an able-bodied person working with someone who's in a seated position, then you should also be in a seated position, and how to work in groups so that you're all on the same playing field. Can you say more about that as you're actually in the process of design?

Yeah, I think that, you know, the big thing is all about user-centric design, and some of the best brands really put their user first. We look at Apple, for an example, as one of the best brands that have done that. But I think we really need to have someone with a disability on all teams at all times so that they can genuinely think about the community in the design and so that design reflects that. No brand will ever get it 100% right, but it's the brands that try And the way to do that is to make sure that you have someone with a disability on the team. And I think kind of that's what April was saying when we met on Saturday, was I want someone that understands me and is really talking to me rather than telling me what I want and how I feel.

Even when you're programming something and, you know, empathy is about what you don't know, right? When you're thinking about designing something and If you are an able-bodied person and you're trying to design something for someone with a disability— April said on Saturday I should never use the word handicapped, but everyone uses the word handicapped.

Even the government.

Even the government. So the only solution then is to have someone and be inclusive in the team dynamics. And you, because you can't design something if you don't know what it is.

Exactly.

I want to switch it up a little bit. People don't talk about the concept of fairness in business very often. It's build the best product, take it to market, see who wins. Fairness, it seems, has a more moral component. And if people are building products that are inherently inaccessible because of the language that defines the product or the interfaces needed to access them or the hardware, does that make it merely bad business or is it actually unfair?

Product should be made to make the world better. So yes, I believe that it's unfair. My company possible, when we create a website or a marketing campaign, we start first with looking at accessibility and representation because that's what we want our clients to think about. So they might not even ask us to do that, but we think the product that we put out, it's unfair if we don't think about accessibility in it. And that's why I work here, because I have a personal belief, if you don't think about that, you're just doing an injustice, and it's— you're not being socially responsible.

That's interesting too, because on the web everyone's trying to be AA, right? But if you do it after you've built this whole website, all of a sudden you can't convert this whole thing to AA, and everyone really struggles with it.

100%.

So you start with it.

Yeah, and that's kind of what a lot of brands have come to myself and Possible to say, hey, what's the best way to kind of backtrack this so that we can, you know, really meet the standards of AA, but everything should be AA+. Don't just solve to really check the boxes, make the experience better and better than what the government's asking you to.

If I go back to the language AI, Alexa voice, you know, what's, what's the worst case scenario you see in the AI machine learning talking internet world if we don't think about this stuff.

People with disabilities will get left behind. And if one-fifth of the world identifies as having a disability, you're losing all the superpowers of people with disabilities, and you're just leaving that and those amazing people behind. I just— it's, it's crazy to think that a business would not think about one-fifth of its users. It just seems like bad business.

What are the problems still unaddressed that you'd like to see solved?

I think website accessibility is huge, and a lot of people are not trying to fix the problem from their— and not taking accountability. I think that clothing is still a huge barrier to people with disabilities. Easy changes can be made. If you look at the button on your shirt, buttons were made when someone was dressing you. No one dresses you anymore. Why do we need buttons in the form that they are? Let's use magnets instead. So I want to see more fashion brands think like that and make those small tweaks to the clothing that allow people and anyone to really wear the clothing itself and, and express themselves.

When you talk about the website, is Amazon accessible? Because they're the biggest in the world. Yeah, I was curious, like, do they do it well or not?

I think that they are definitely trying. And then especially with voice, that is where they are putting a lot of their time to be able to help people with disabilities. But it's, it's not, it's not fully great. It's not AAA, um, It only sometimes works with different disability products, but they definitely are trying. And I think that voice will allow for people with disabilities to be able to access and use Amazon more.

In the talking internet that is coming, and you know, you said it really has changed and made things easier for you. What is something you dream about? What is something you dream about saying, "Hey Alexa," and it would be magical?

That's a really good question. I think being able to have Alexa control a device. So I always think in the future when I have kids, hey Alexa, have their like bed rock them to sleep. So that since I physically can't able to do that, I would like the products to help me do that and to be that barrier because I know with, you know, the medical research is getting better and better, but during my time, I don't think I'm going to get the use of my arms back. But if I can control things with my voice and control devices that will be assisting my kids, that is probably what will be the most impactful for me, given that that's, you know, my worst fear.

What is your worst fear?

I think not being able to help my kids and be able to hold them and, and feed them and do all those type of things. But if I'm able to instruct something to do that, and it not being a human and it being an actual device, I think that would be really wonderful.

Do you have anything else to say?

I would just— I don't want people to be scared to offend someone by not doing anything. I think a lot of people are scared to really talk about disability and they're scared they represent disability in a wrong way. But if you're too scared to do something and don't act on it, then nothing's going to get done. So don't be scared, just ask someone with a disability and they'll be able to help you. And that's what I think really is why so many brands haven't thought thought about people with disabilities is because they're scared and they don't know.

What is the first question to ask?

What would you change? And what would you want?

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Alright, thanks for listening, and thanks to Christina Mallen. Remember, you can meet Christina at the VOICE Summit Wednesday at 3:30. And look for the Machine Learning banner. We're going to be there for the whole show and would love to get your feedback on how we can make Machine Learning super useful for you and your team. Get in touch on Twitter @Assist. DMs are open. Tell us who you think should appear on the podcast. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this with someone who cares about how we make sense of these changing times. Machine Learning by Assist is made by Paul Ciuffo and Michael Alsesser for Lumina House. Have a great day.