I am passionate about my work as a Product Inclusion Specialist, a profession where I build products that work for everybody, regardless of ability, gender, resources, culture, race, or class. I focus on building ethical products and processes that resist exploiting customers as merely transactional profit providers, because greed is the enemy of equal socioeconomic progress, and there is a middle: building equitably for both people and profits.
As technology has exploded around us and demonstrated capabilities beyond our imagination, we've come to believe that building machines will relieve us of our own biases and shortcomings. Machines, we believe, won't be flawed the way we are. With those beliefs in mind, we build triage robots to complete patient intake. They're made of metal, wires, and software, and thus can't carry preconceived notions, so they can't discriminate, right? In fact, machines are infused with our biases, because the healthcare providers who contribute to the education of these robots consistently rate pain with bias. The chilling reality is that we have seen time and again how race, age, and gender can all affect how your condition is assessed as well as the type of care you're ultimately provided—decisions that have life or death consequences.
The Myth of Neutral Technology
Technologies have become invisible to many of us. We use them so often that we forget these ubiquitous conveniences—banking, public transit, credit cards, automobiles, even soap dispensers—as well as those that are new to us, are all designed and engineered by human beings who bring their own biases, conscious or not, to the design and engineering of these tools.
These are the biases that exclude many of us from participating fully in this ever-changing and rapidly-growing digital world. It is for this exact reason that I incorporate anthropological perspectives in my work for product inclusion. Anthropology pushes us to be curious, to ask questions about how the world works; it pushes us to question 'truth,' to consider it and examine it from many vantage points.
Anthropology is an academic discipline that studies human society and culture, history and biology, our existence and subsistence, and the relationships we build with one another and the environment. With this approach I recognize that as people, we are unique not necessarily for our individual differences, but for our ability to bring our lived experiences, as shaped by our culture, environments, societies, and relationships, to bear on our individual truths. Biases are not unique to any one individual; we all have them; they're part of being human. And more importantly, they're key to building better products.
Why I Do This Work
I often share this story: In 2015 while on a job search, my phone's keyboard auto-completed my middle name, 'Dédé' as 'deadbeat.' It was a sobering reminder of who designed this technology and who they were designing for. This wasn't an isolated incident—it was a symptom of systemic exclusion in tech design.
These moments of exclusion accumulate. They tell people: you weren't considered. Your name, your language, your way of being in the world—it wasn't part of the plan. And when products consistently fail you, you start to question whether you belong in these digital spaces at all.
Moving from Invisibility to Empathy
For too long, marginalized communities have been invisible in the design process. Their needs weren't considered. Their voices weren't heard. Their experiences weren't valued. The result? Products and services that don't work for them—or worse, actively harm them.
Radical empathy means more than understanding someone else's perspective. It means actively centering their experience in the design process. It means recognizing that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. It means building with communities, not just for them.
This is why diverse teams matter. Not as tokens or checkboxes, but as experts. People who have experienced exclusion know where the gaps are. They know what questions to ask. They know what 'edge cases' are actually everyday experiences for millions of people.
The Path Forward
Building inclusive technology isn't about adding features at the end. It's about fundamentally rethinking who we design for and how we design. It's about questioning our assumptions. It's about bringing diverse voices into every stage of the process—from conception through deployment and beyond.
The future of technology must be one where everyone can participate fully—where accessibility isn't an afterthought, where representation isn't tokenism, where inclusion isn't optional. This is the work I'm committed to, and the work I hope you'll join.
Because when we build products that work for the most marginalized among us, we build products that work better for everyone. That's not just good ethics—it's good business. And it's the future of technology.