Fred Schindler
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I was in a hotel in Canada a few years ago and was scanning through the television channels. It was in the winter, and most of the channels featured ice hockey: a few live games and some additional programs covering or discussing hockey. This wasn’t altogether surprising. Hockey is very popular. To die-hard Canadian hockey fans, what I witnessed wasn’t just a bunch of hockey programs, but a variety of hockey programs: different teams, different leagues, different playing styles.
We’ve all heard that the Inuit people have dozens of different words for snow. I don’t know if that is true, but I can imagine that for a people who are surrounded by snow for much of the year, the language can efficiently describe the variety of snow. Skiers also have multiple names for snow: powder, corn, crud, slush, mashed potatoes, to name a few. And that’s just for one snow-based activity.
People who deal with snow all of the time see a variety of snow. For those who only experience occasional snow, they just think of it as “snow.” Many Canadians see variety in hockey. For an alien that dropped into Canada from another universe, hockey would be a singular thing.
When someone asks me what my profession is and I answer “engineer,” what does it mean? For someone in a nontechnical field, they may have a vague idea that I build things. If I answer “electrical engineer” they might have a better idea. If they have a technical background or technical interests, they may ask for more information. There are many different types of engineer, and quite a range of electrical engineering specialties.
IEEE has an Industry Engagement Committee (EIC) whose mission includes identifying products and services that support industry, with a goal of increasing IEEE’s engagement with industry and vice versa. But what industry: semiconductor, power, computers, communications, radar, biotech? There are hundreds of different industries that relate to what we do in IEEE. And within each industry there are dozens of types of engineers: design, product, marketing, test, manufacturing, application, sales. There is a vast matrix of industry professionals that do, or could make use of, IEEE products and services. IEC has existed for close to a decade and hasn’t made much headway. IEEE’s industry engagement hasn’t improved. Perhaps the issue is that we don’t recognize the great variety and therefore the scale of the challenge.
The Inuit recognize many types of snow. Technology professionals recognize many types of industry. We need the diversity of all of those professionals to define what products and services they could make use of.
The same applies to other businesses. How can a group of people with limited perspective understand what the greater population wants or needs? A group that only knows hockey will think that people involved in sports need skates, pucks, sticks, pads, helmets, and goals. They would foresee the need for a great variety of hockey items: sizes, colors, capabilities. But what about sneakers, balls, rackets, clubs, bats, nets, or gloves? Would they anticipate the need for that equipment?
There are plenty of real-world examples of product shortcomings that result when a limited set of perspectives was included in the development. There is the well-documented failure of facial recognition systems to properly identify individuals with dark skin. That may mostly be a matter of how the systems were trained. If the training was based on images of a light-skinned population, it’s understandable that there would be limitations when analyzing facial images with dark skin. But what about the soap dispenser that only deposits soap on hands with light skin? Dark skin doesn’t reflect enough light to the sensor. People with dark skin have to resort to holding a piece of paper under the dispenser to get any soap. (It’s a real thing: google it.) I doubt anyone with dark skin was involved in the development, testing, or calibration of that dispenser.
I’ve seen complaints about the size of smartphones. The engineering teams that developed the first smartphones were primarily male, and on average men have larger hands than women. At first people with small hands found the smartphone formfactor less convenient than those with larger hands. But we’ve since adapted, and if anything, smartphones have grown in size. Part of the adaptation is that people stick grips or knobs on the backs of their phones to make them easier to handle with one hand. I suspect these devices are more popular among users with small hands. I wonder if that’s who invented them.
There have been plenty of studies that show that outcomes improve when the diversity of the development team increases. It doesn’t even need to be specifically related to the needs or characteristics of the population. A filter design team, for example, doesn’t better understand the filter requirements based on the characteristics of the members of the design team. But, when the design team has a broader range of backgrounds and experiences, it seems there that there is a wider range of views on how to address the requirements, and therefore a better outcome. It reminds me of the old Apple Computer tagline: “Think different.”
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2023.3313787