White Default

Jacquelyn Iyamah on “white default”:

The white default speaks to the ways in which society teaches us that to be white is to be “the norm.” Designers often use the white default to make assumptions about how everyone shows up in the world, which ends up contributing to practices that exclude. This can look like facial recognition that is unable to detect people with dark skin, “nude” products such as Band-Aids that only cater to white skin, speech-to-text software that mistranscribes Black speakers nearly twice as often as white speakers, or medical illustrations that only display white skin.

April 5, 2022