Book review: Building for Everyone
One of the most welcome trends in ethical tech is an overdue focus on a wider range of stakeholders and users: a shift from designing at or for diverse groups toward designing with them.
Building for Everyone, written by Google head of product inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste, has arrived, then, at just the right time. The movement is rightly being led by people from historically underrepresented groups, and I’ve long had the book on pre-order, interested to read the all-too-rare perspectives of a Black woman in a position of tech leadership.
Jean-Baptiste’s convincing angle is that diversity and inclusion isn’t just a matter of HR policy or culture; it’s an ethos that should infuse how companies conceive, design, test, and deliver products. Make no mistake, this is a practitioner’s volume, with a focus on pragmatic change rather than, say, critical race theory. It’s an easy, even quick read.
It’s also a Googley read. While I have a soft spot for Google – or at least I’m easier on it than many of my peers – I find the company to have a curious default mindset: massive yet strongly provincial, the Silicon Valley equivalent of the famous View of the World from 9th Avenue New Yorker cover. True to form, Building for Everyone draws heavily on internal stories and evidence.
Google also has a reputation as an occasionally overzealous censor of employee output, and here the overseer’s red pen bleeds through the pages. The story told is one of triumph: an important grass-roots effort snowballed and successfully permeated a large company’s culture, and here’s how you can do it too. Jean-Baptiste deserves great credit for her role in this maturation and adoption, but the road has been rockier than Building for Everyone is allowed to admit. Entries such as ‘Damore, James’ or ‘gorillas’ – unedifying but critical challenges within Google’s inclusion journey – are conspicuously absent from the index.
This isn’t Jean-Baptiste’s fault, of course. An author who holds a prominent role in tech can offer valuable authority and compelling case studies. The trade-off is that PR and communications teams frequently sanitise the text to the verge of propaganda. Want the big-name cachet? Be prepared to sacrifice some authenticity. The book is therefore limited in what it can really say, and inclusion is positioned mostly as a modifier to existing practices: research becomes inclusive research, ideation becomes inclusive ideation, and so on.
This stance does offer some advantages. It scopes the book as an accessible guide to practical first steps, rather than a revolutionary manifesto. Building for Everyone seeks to urge and inspire, and does so. Jean-Baptiste skilfully argues for inclusion as both a moral and financial duty; only the most chauvinistic reader can remain in denial about how important and potentially profitable this work is.
Nevertheless, this is a book that puts all its chips on change from within. But is that ever sufficient? The downside to repurposing existing tech processes and ideologies is that in many cases those tech processes and ideologies are the problem: they are, after all, what’s led to exclusionary tech in the first place. At what point do we say the baby deserves to be ejected with the bathwater?
We need incrementalist, pragmatic books that win technologists’ hearts and minds, and establish inclusion as non-optional. If that’s the book you need right now, Building For Everyone will likely hit the spot. But we also need fiercer books that take the intellectual fight directly to an uncomfortable industry. Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice, next on my list, looks at first glance to fill that role, if not overflow it. More on that soon.
