Amy Ko

Code and computation, for example, who gets to decide what data is gathered about you and what's done with it? So when I say silence is privilege, what I mean is if we don't talk about all of these broken things, how are we ever going to reclaim any of that power for the things that we need it for like living our lives?

Liz Gerber (host)

We are so excited to welcome Dr. Amy Ko: researcher, activist, entrepreneur and professor at the University of Washington. She's a thought leader at the intersection of computing, learning, design and justice. She recently released a new book called Critically Conscious Computing, which we can't wait to hear more about. Welcome, Amy, thank you so much for being with us today.

Amy Ko

So happy to be here.

Liz Gerber (host)

So we're going to start with some silly questions just to—easy, hopefully easy, silly questions—to get going before we get into the deep stuff. Which is what is your favorite way to start your morning?

Amy Ko

Oh, my favorite way to start my morning. I really love food. So I make big breakfasts, I usually dive into some like, glorious breakfast burrito and some granola and coffee. It's my biggest meal of the day.

Liz Gerber (host)

Excellent. Thank you. So on to the topics. Um, Amy, can you tell us how you got started in the world of technology? And you can start wherever you'd like.

Amy Ko

Yeah, this is, this is a weird story, because it's Middle School. And it's Middle School, pre algebra class. And my math teacher says on the first day of class, go buy one of these graphing calculators. And everybody's like, why? What is a graphing calculator? Why do we have to buy one and then he teaches us how to enter these really boring looking programs. And then they were really boring programs, right how to calculate some trigonometric thing or something. But what happened shortly after that was one of my classmates had an older brother. And he had a version of Tetris on his calculator, and it started spreading virally throughout the classroom. And the idea that I could play my favorite GameBoy game on my graphing calculator was amazing. And then I got it. And it turned out, you couldn't play it. It was so slow, every each little piece would erase and then render. So it was kind of like, functionally Tetris, but not Tetris. Because you couldn't play it. And so I just got really inspired to try to understand how the game was built and spent a whole summer trying to make it so that it was faster to play, and really got into programming and design and interaction design just on my calculator.

Liz Gerber (host)

Seriously. So it started with a middle school with a graphing calculator. That's wonderful.

Amy Ko

Yeah, I mean, it was this amazing device, battery powered, portable computer that lets you draw and do animation and do all kinds of things. If only you can figure out how to write in this cryptic programming language. Right. And so once I learned how to do that, it just felt like this amazing little platform I could carry with me everywhere.

Liz Gerber (host)

Wow, it was mobile computing in its earliest days, wasn't it? Yeah. Interesting. And so and then what was another? So you went from the calculator you're in? I would say you're, you're beyond programming for calculators now. So can you give us another another highlight? I'm particularly interested in your, your interest in justice and diversity as it relates to computing. So take me from the calculator to where you are today.

Amy Ko

Yeah, there's a couple of big leaps there. So one of them is, I spent a lot of time after that calculator experience making for other people making for my friends. My friends were musicians, for example, and artists, and they wanted tools. So I would spend time trying to create things for them. And I learned really quickly that I didn't know how to make things that they wanted or needed. And so you know…

Liz Gerber (host)

Do you have a concrete example that could illustrate that? If you're willing?

Amy Ko

Yes, one of my illustrator friends in high school, he just loved drawing, and he spent a lot of time creating, like pixel art. And I decided to make this whole beautiful pixel art painting program for him so that we could make a game together. And after weeks and weeks of him drawing, he created all of this wonderful art. And then now it's like, tell me about how the tool went, right? And he's like, Well, I actually just use Microsoft Paint, I couldn't figure out how to use the thing that you need. And that was my first lesson and realizing, oh, design is hard. Making things for other people is a different thing than making something for yourself.

Liz Gerber (host)

Oh wow.

Amy Ko

So when I stumbled upon design and human computer interaction in college. It was like, these are my people, I have to figure out how to create things for other people that I don't necessarily understand. I wanted to learn methods. I wanted to learn ways of creating things and prototyping stuff. And so I kind of stumbled into design through that and went to graduate school to learn more about really how to make things that were actually useful to people. The second big leap was really into recognizing that my role as a designer wasn't necessarily the one that should be centered or privileged in creating things, right. So that realization that design as a sort of position of authority, and a position of deciding how the world should be actually doesn't quite make sense when you've got all these people in the world who need things, who often know what they need, but just can't create it or envision it themselves. So I made a shift there probably five or six years ago to really recognizing that my role as designer as much more facilitator than it is sort of decision maker. And that was a big change. And so I started thinking a lot more about whose voices are being centered in design and trying to write and teach about them.

Liz Gerber (host)

Wonderful. Is there a project that you could describe that illustrates that turning point, or one of the early projects in this area?

Amy Ko

Oh, yeah, I think probably the one of the biggest things that convinced me of it was being an industry, I'd started, co founded, and was CTO of a company for three or four years. And during that whole time, you know, I was so distant from the people I was designing for, there was me, and then there was the companies we were selling to, and then there was their customers. And all of those layers between us. And them just meant that I just had no way to communicate with all of these people that we were trying to help by providing answers on websites. And so there was something about the idea that it wasn't just me in that scenario, being the decision maker, it was all of these other intermediaries, organizations, decision makers within those organizations. And then everybody else just gets to live with whatever decisions were made through through all of that. And so that made it really acute to me, right? Like, I could see exactly all the structures that were in the way of people getting what they needed. And I started wondering about, you know, what does this look like in other design contexts? And so that's when I started reading and, and really questioning some of those ideas, honestly, that I was taught in grad school about how design works.

Liz Gerber (host)

Yes, absolutely. In a recent Medium post, you wrote some words that were really I'd like to repeat here and have you expand on them, they moved me quite a bit. You said that you believe your passion for diversity stems from the deep void of a group affinity in your life. And I'm wondering if you can speak if you're willing to speak more about that. I thought that was very profound and wondering how that relates to your professional interest in design and technology?

Amy Ko

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of thinking about because of this justice orientation towards thinking about design, about just my position in the world. How do I fit in? How do I not fit in? What kinds of platforms are okay for me to sort of represent people for and what kinds of platforms is it not okay in? And so there's a lot of questions that I have around, what does it mean for me to be a member of a group? And so we'll often talk about this in diversity, a lot will say, somebody is a part of an underrepresented group, what does it mean to actually be part of that group? And so I really struggle with that a lot, right? Am I a white woman? Is that who I am? Maybe I guess, in some contexts, that's what I am. Am I an Asian woman? Yeah, in some contexts, that was it. That's what I am. But in most contexts, I don't feel like I'm either of those things, just because I'm both but other people don't see me as both. They see me as neither. And that just really raises fascinating questions, I think around what it means to be doing design work for other people, right? When are you somebody that really has license to do something on behalf of a larger group? And when do you not? So I struggle a lot with figuring out how do I place myself in the world? Yes, that's one of the ways that we decide who gets authority to make decisions for groups.

Liz Gerber (host)

Right. That's really interesting. To bring it back to something you said earlier about you seeing your role more as a facilitator. I'm curious, what role does identity play in facilitation? You talked about as identity and decision making, and I'm curious how you're thinking about identity and decision making or facilitating rather?

Amy Ko

Yeah, yeah, in decision making, there's just so many different choices that have to be made. And at some level, even if you're a facilitator in a design context, somebody has to make a decision. It's not that we can completely decentralize everything, somewhere in some collaboration, whether it's participatory or community based, there has to be somebody saying, Well, I think this is what we're going to do. And that may be it may even be consensus driven. But in those contexts, right, there's so much around identity that's a play in that who gets listened to, who doesn't get listened to who gets a platform to speak, who doesn't get a platform to speak and those are all of the tensions I think that are sort of at how we have to think about navigating a lot of those decision making challenges in those social contexts. Who are we who gets to make the decision here? Who gets to have the power? That's sort of ultimately the question.

Right? So have you been stating your identity? How has this affected your everyday design practice?

For a while it sort of shut it down, right? I just felt a little bit just uncertain about how to even approach approach design. And so for a lot, many, many years, I just started thinking about, how do we understand what we even need to do. And I did lots of research on different aspects of design and started thinking a lot about learning and education and contexts in which people were trying to figure out their own position and their own role as engineers and designers. I think that's shifted recently, I'm starting to feel like, you know what, I have some expertise, there's a balance between decision making from a place of power and justice and, and decision making from a perspective of knowledge, too. So a lot of what I've started doing recently, is just trying to work on things where I really feel like I do know what I'm talking about, like, I've listened to a lot of people. I think maybe having done research on some of the things that I've done for 20 years, maybe gives me license to make some decisions now. So those are some of the tensions that I wrestle with right now. I also think the bar set for that is unreasonably high, like, nobody should have to study something for 20 years before they have permission to create something. That's not, that's not the way the world needs to work, right? We need to make things a little more frequently than that. But I do feel like, certainly, as a researcher, and as a scholar, I feel a little bit more responsibility to be sure about things. And so I think I'm coming to it from that scholarly stance and saying, like, well, let's, let's up hold that value of really feeling like we know something. And then if we're making a statement about something like through design or creation of something, let's just be certain about that, too.

Liz Gerber (host)

I want to contrast that with some of the messages we give to our young students about moving fast and breaking things, not necessarily knowing the right answer. And so I'd love to hear your advice, or your thoughts on how that works with the advice we give to young designers, certainly.

Amy Ko

You know, that phrase in particular, I've always struggled with it. Because at one level, it's really advocating for prototyping and learning, right? Make something, see what works, try to understand why it did or didn't work. And I think what often gets lost in that phrase is do you ship the thing that may or may not work? Do you subject a large group of people to having to use it and without their permission kind of change their entire social world through some online community through doing that, right, a lot of this is associated with, you know, a period of design at Facebook. And so like, there's a part of it that I really feel is an essential piece of design, which is you have to show things to people, potential users of something, and get their feedback and their perspectives and be willing to throw something away and be willing to make mistakes in order to understand what might actually work, despite your intuitions. But then there's this question of, when do you put something into the world as a piece of infrastructure that everybody actually has to live with? I think that's a completely different decision than one of searching through a design space for some idea. That's, I mean, that's creating the world. Right? So pressing that release button is a really different thing. Yeah, it makes me, well, I love that just the visual is beautiful. I'm trying to figure out where is the release button?

Where is it? Right? And I think that there's some strategies, even rhetorical strategies that some companies have used to kind of say, we haven't pressed the release button, even though we kind of have.

Liz Gerber (host)

Yes.

Amy Ko

Like a beta label that Google would put on things like back in the early days of Google.

Liz Gerber (host)

Oh, interesting.

Amy Ko

How many years did Gmail have the word beta on it?

Liz Gerber (host)

Great point.

Amy Ko

You know, they were trying to communicate and signal like, this isn't done, we haven't released this. If you're using it, you're helping us learn and get feedback. You're giving us feedback on whether this is good. But at some level, right? When they had, I don't know, hundreds of millions of users, and it still had the beta level label on it. And people were using it as critical infrastructure and their work lives and personal lives. Beta seemed like a lie.

Liz Gerber (host)

Really interesting. And I've definitely heard the idea of a product's never done. It's always a prototype, etc. And I'd never thought about it as a rhetorical strategy for protecting an idea.

Amy Ko

For kind of making space for a design team to continue exploring and iterating right. So setting expectations around mistakes to like defects and other things. Right?

Liz Gerber (host)

Exactly, exactly. But then when something becomes, but I wouldn't want it to take away from people's responsibility. I'm wondering if it also is equated with being less responsible. Hey, we were just playing around. Yeah, we didn't mean to do that.

Amy Ko

Yeah. And I mean, you see this in other ways, too, even in legal contexts, like Microsoft still famously has a segment of their their license that they give, when people say, Yes, I use the software. And it says in the license, this software, these are not the exact words, but this software is not intended for any particular purpose. You know, and this is like Word version 27. Still not intended for any particular purpose. And so that goes directly to responsibility and kind of how Microsoft's legal team is viewing its responsibility towards people using it software. They're saying no purpose, there is no purpose or intent behind this entire product.

Liz Gerber (host)

So this naturally brings me to the next question, which is about surprising things you've learned in your journey so far through through tech and through design, you've hit on a few of them. One is I think, presentation versus reality. One is the speed at which we move. I'm curious if there's other learnings that you'd like to share with our audience.

Amy Ko

You know, I mentioned being in this startup and being CTO for several years and being in a startup scene here in Seattle and hanging out with lots of other people. My first instinct going into that world was, everybody must know so much more than me, I'm going to just learn from all of these experts who've been doing this for a long time. But I realized pretty quickly that most people don't have any clue of what the right design is or what the right answers are, or whether their strategies are appropriate, or how their hirings approaches are working out. They don't really know anything, this difference between people who are aware of that and honest about it, and people who are just extremely overconfident about it. And I really changed how I navigated that space. You know, it meant that I didn't see the world through like how people were presenting their expertise. I started seeing it much more through can I distinguish between somebody's overconfidence and somebody's expertise?

Liz Gerber (host)

Moving on to what are you excited about that you're working on today? What's getting you just up in the morning after your lavish breakfast? What do you get excited about working on?

Amy Ko

Between the burritos and the cats?

Liz Gerber (host)

Yes, between the burritos and the cat? Well said, yeah. Is there anything? Maybe there needs to be nothing in between?

Amy Ko

Oh, yes, there's two things. So I'm just starting a sabbatical right now. So like, really top of mind for me right now is what are the things that I really want to spend a lot of focus time on. And there's two big ones that really capture a lot of my attention. And one is very much about people. And the other one's very much technology. And I think they're connected, but who knows, maybe not. The people one is, I am deeply fascinated by what it means to help people become great teachers of design and computing. I think that that is, you know, if you've ever taught teachers, or talk to teachers about their learning, you realize it's probably one of the hardest things we can do is help people feel like they can be confident in teaching other people successfully. And it's another one of those areas where really, most of the time we don't know what we're doing. And we're just guessing. And so I'm really, I'm really fascinated by what it means to bring people, aspiring teachers together and have them feel like they can build confidence and a lifelong practice of improving their practice of being teachers, and at the same time, help students learn along the way. That's just a fascinating thing from, from my perspective, and then when you layer on design and computing on to it, then it just becomes all the more challenging.

Liz Gerber (host)

I was just about to say. I'm curious if you have any other intervention, ideas that you think will build confidence.

Amy Ko

We just finished up our first cohort of the secondary teacher education program at the College of Education at the University of Washington here. And we taught our first cohort of computer science, pre service teachers. And the big thing that we learned from teaching this, this first cohort was that before we could do anything to talk about teaching computer science, or talking about equity, injustice, or talking about students identities in relation to computer science, we had to convince teachers that computer science wasn't this impenetrable, impossible thing to learn for themselves. And we had to deconstruct all of these assumptions around who can do it who can succeed in learning it? Is it an innate thing? Is it something that anybody can learn to do? AN example is some of our teachers thought and I think reasonably so given all the stereotypes that software engineers know every single API and programming language on the planet. They might know a tiny fraction of them, and their knowledge might decay in a couple of years or become less relevant a couple of years, so they're constantly learning. So what it means to be a software engineer is to know almost nothing, but just enough to be able to make progress on whatever the current pop culture API or language or platform is. And then the other thing that's on my mind is the more technical thing, which is, I spent 20 years studying programming and programming tools and languages and trying to figure out how to help them help people learn how to use them to express themselves and create things. And there are just so many inclusion gaps in the entirety of programming languages and all the tools around them. The two big ones I think that are most egregious are accessibility. If you have motor or vision impairments of any kind, you almost can't use most programming languages and tools, which means you can't really participate at all and making things with computing. And the other one is language inclusion. So almost every single thing in the world assumes English. And so if you don't know English, you can't get documentation, you can't get tools, you can't get resources, you basically can't learn anything. So the idea that we would just take the majority in the world and say, Now you don't get to participate in this, you don't get to decide how to make things, or even create stuff for yourself. Those seem like two major and justices. So I'm trying to create something that addresses those two inclusion gaps. So new language, new tools, new platforms, like what does it look like to create something that erases some of those inclusion issues?

Liz Gerber (host)

Wow, can you give us any hints as to what direction you're going?

Amy Ko

Focusing, in particular, on creative coding in schools. So what would it look like for let's say, some middle schoolers who might not see themselves as participating in computing in that way at all? What might convince them that that they'd want to and so what I've been doing is tackling parts of the design space of creative coding media that just haven't been looked at. So what I'm playing with is interactive typography. And so we have static type, like graphic designs, and we have motion type, like you see in movies and televisions and advertisements text flying around, but what we don't have is anything that responds to input, which is the amazing and exciting thing about computation. So what does it mean to do things like interactive poetry, where, I don't know, a poem that responds to you talking to it, for example. And so all of the output is going to be text and therefore accessible in all kinds of ways from a screen reader perspective, but also text because of language inclusion, so that everything you make will be easy to translate between things. So the programs themselves will be in multiple languages, the output you create will be in multiple languages. So that's the kind of playground that I'm in right now is trying to imagine what that creative context looks like.

So I've got to ask what your process is for that, where does this happen?

At the moment, I've sort of conceptualized this design project as sort of art therapy for myself. And so I'm almost not thinking about it as design initially. Instead, it's more like I've had an incredibly hard past few years during the pandemic, and gender transition, and six years of, you know, full professor ring and all the exhaustion that comes with that. And so I thought it would be fun to just sit down like I did with my calculator back in middle school.

Liz Gerber (host)

I can't help but notice your Twitter bio is brilliant, and I'd love you to expand on it. Your Twitter bio bio, the part that resonated with with us was silence is privilege code is power. And so you spoke a bit about the code is power, I'm wondering if you can speak more to the silence is privilege part of your bio.

Amy Ko

I think even when when anybody comes to see the world, as it is, you realize that almost everything in the world is kind of broken from an equity and justice perspective, people don't have what they need to live their lives, and sometimes even live code and computation, for example, who gets to decide what data is gathered about you and what's done with it. In the United States, it's pretty much whoever made the software and nobody else. And this is despite the fact that this can determine whether people are getting loans, whether they're getting into the college that they want to get into, whether they can get the jobs that they want. So when I say silence is privilege, what I mean is if we don't talk about all of these broken things, we don't make them visible, we don't demand better, it will stay the same, nothing will change. And so we don't speak up and talk about that. How are we ever going to reclaim any of that power for the things that we need it for, like living our lives?

Liz Gerber (host)

So you are a visionary. What is your vision of the perfect, well, a great world that we might aspire to in terms of, would everybody know how to code, would everybody have access to coding? What's the big vision of the ideal situation we could get ourselves to?

Amy Ko

Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't, I don't actually subscribe to that everybody should learn to code kind of paradigm of democratizing computing. I think the one that I believe in this one's a little less common is I want everybody to understand what computation is at some kind of level of literacy. So that when they're in those hard moral and ethical situations where they have to make one of these choices, that ends up perpetuating some system of oppression or further aggravating it, that they don't feel like they're the only one having to make that hard choice. I want them to feel like everybody else around also knows that this is a bad choice that I'm making. So I'm safe to not make it.

Liz Gerber (host)

Before we round out here. I'd love to ask, this is what we call the mentor moment. What is some perhaps unexpected advice you have for anybody entering this..your field, defined broadly.

Amy Ko

I started doing a lot more work that thinks about justice, and even more reductively talking about ethics and design and technology and computing, I've started having a lot more conversations with people in lots of contexts around what it means to actually make those hard moral judgments in an organizational context or in a project you're working on. And it's not ever as simple as figure out what's right and then do it. Far more complicated than that than that. It's like, do what's right, if you can, but if you can't, because it might mean that you don't have a job. Or it might mean that your family doesn't have what it means. Right? It means that capitalism, and all of those questions of justice, are in direct conflict. So what is the moral calculus around resolving those? So a lot of the advice that, you know, I don't think is final or complete advice at all, is just telling anybody, whether it's a student, or an employee in a company or an alumni member that we have that I'm talking to, like, at some level, you have to make the decision that's right for you. If you're accounting for all of the other people at the same time, and you still have to make the choice that's right for you. That's not necessarily wrong, right. It's certainly better than not thinking about everybody else at all.

Liz Gerber (host)

That's beautiful. Thank you so much. Lauren, is there anything else that we should expand upon?

Lauren Lin

Yeah, I think in terms of like, another mentor moment, question, like how can students get involved in engaging the tech ethics mindset? Because I don't think it's considered a core part of curriculum yet. And so it's kind of hard to seek out those resources or opportunities.

Amy Ko

Yeah.

Liz Gerber (host)

Yeah. That's a great question. So Lauren is a student. So concretely, Amy, what can young young students do today who want to advocate for equity and justice and tech ethics?

Amy Ko

Yeah, the today thing I think, is, you know, Lauren, you mentioned that it's not part of curriculum, not part of design curriculum, often not part of computer science curriculum, not even part of business school technology management curriculum, any of these things. So in some sense, what you can do is just be a student of that knowledge, go read all of the things that we are learning about those challenges. And, you know, teach yourself, find others to learn with, do book clubs about these things. I think that's the baseline for being able to take action, even if you don't have the power in your context to actually make change happen in some direct way, you can learn and even by doing that, you'll be more knowledgeable than all of the people actually making decisions about curriculum and making hiring decisions about where you work. And probably the senior designers you'll work under or the senior engineers who work under, you'll know more about that, too. So I think that's a path to sort of, at some point, eventually getting that power, making better choices.

Liz Gerber (host)

And speaking of books, I mean, they could read your new book Critically Conscious Computing, which you've made available for everybody online.

Amy Ko

Yeah, the core audience for this book might scare people away, which is this is for middle school and high school teachers to learn how to teach computer science in equity and justice centered ways to middle schoolers and high schoolers. That said, you know, we cite all of those books you should read, very focused core audience and a sort of universal secondary audience, anybody that wants to know what computer science is, in those terms. We'll find the answers in those books, at least the preliminary ones that we've written so far.

Liz Gerber (host)

And if people want to continue following your work, Amy, how can they?

Amy Ko

Yeah, I do my best asked to keep my faculty website up to date with everything blog posts, research papers, what our current projects are all of those things. If you want the more real time thing, I do usually tweet about new things that are happening. I've been taking a little bit of a break lately, but Twitter is probably the best way for the real time stuff.

Liz Gerber (host)

Well, Amy, thank you again. Thank you so much.