Doing Inclusive Design: From GenderMag to InclusiveMag
Speaker
Margaret Burnett
OSU Distinguished Professor, Oregon State University
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
How can software professionals assess whether their software supports diverse users? And if they find problems, how can they fix them? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software’s support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, we developed GenderMag, a method for finding and fixing “gender inclusivity bugs" -- gender biases in software interfaces and workflows. We then introduced InclusiveMag, a generalization of GenderMag that can be used to generate systematic inclusiveness methods for other dimensions of diversity. In this talk, we present the latest GenderMag results, and then introduce InclusiveMag and our early experiences with it.
Speaker's Bio
Margaret Burnett is an OSU Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer ever hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to enable computer users not trained in programming to improve their own software, and co-leads the team that created GenderMag (gendermag.org), a software inspection process that uncovers user-facing gender biases in software from smart systems to programming environments. Together with her collaborators and students, she has contributed some of the seminal work in both of those areas, and also in explaining AI to ordinary end users. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and a member of the Academic Alliance Advisory Board of the National Center for Women In Technology (NCWIT).
Speaker's Website
http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/
Host
Brad Myers