BOOK TALK: In Through the Side Door

Join us for a book talk with ERIN MALONE, uncovering the untold story of how women pioneers shaped the field of user experience & design.

June 12th at 1pm ET / 10am PT
REGISTER HERE

The vital story of how women designers and researchers pioneered the field of interaction and user experience design for software and digital interfaces.

Framed against the backdrop of contemporary waves of feminism and the history of computing design, In through the Side Door foregrounds the stories of the women working in the field of computing and the emergent discipline of interaction design as the graphical user interface was developed. Erin Malone begins with a handful of pioneers who brought to the field various methods from a variety of backgrounds including design, technical communication, social psychology, ethnography, information science, and mechanical engineering. Moving into the early days of desktop computing, the book highlights the women on the teams inventing contemporary desktop computer interfaces and related tools, including those at Xerox PARC, Apple’s Human Interface Group, and Microsoft.

Malone takes the reader through the invention of the World Wide Web, the third wave of feminism, and the dot-com boom and bust. Coming up to contemporary times, the book features women working on the web, designing equipment interfaces, and working in voice UX, mobile design, and civic design, and continues with the up-and-coming leaders driving social impact, changing human-centered design and research, and working to be accountable for the harms of contemporary software products. Along the way, the author also touches on the challenges and biases women have faced in the workplace and continue to encounter despite cultural and sociological advancements.

Purchase In Through the Side Door from publisher MIT Press.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

ERIN MALONE is an author, design historian, educator and a recently paused senior level user experience designer and researcher who has spent her career deconstructing complex systems, designing web and software applications, social experiences and leading experience design teams. She is currently a Professor and the Chair of the Interaction Design BFA program at California College of the Arts.

She recently spent several years consulting with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, fighting hate in online social spaces and games, and spearheaded the creation of their Social Pattern Library intended to offer micro-interactions and user experience recommendations for mitigating hate in social spaces.

She is the co-author of both editions of the book Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media (2009, 2015).

In her spare time she is a fine art photographer, printmaker, and letterpress printer. She lives with a dog and 2 black cats who inspired the name of her printmaking studio – 8 Paw Press.

ABBY COVERT is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes.

Abby has written two popular books, How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website www.abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular eCommerce shop. In 2022 she started The Sensemakers Club where she brings together sensemakers from different walks of life to learn from one another. Abby lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mom’.