shanzefatimajaved
shanzefatimajaved
Design Dialectic ~ Shanze
8 posts
Digital Experience & Product Designer blending UX, technology, and storytelling. I write about designing with empathy, questioning conventions, and making digital spaces more inclusive.
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
shanzefatimajaved · 2 months ago
Text
The more I design, the more I think good design is a kind of quiet language.
It doesn’t shout for attention. It doesn’t try to prove how clever it is.
It just meets people where they are.
It says: I see you. I thought about what you need.
As the designers we have to set the standard and keep coming back to it —
Not just making things usable or beautiful,
But making them feel like they were made with respect.
1 note · View note
shanzefatimajaved · 4 months ago
Text
The Quiet Language of UX
The first time I designed something that didn’t require a screen, I finally understood what UX really meant.
As someone who entered UX through design sprints and wireframes, I used to think of user experience as an elegant flow, a well balanced screen, a smooth tap. But a few months ago, I found myself designing a physical escape room experience — for blind and low-vision teenagers. No screens. No visuals. Just sound, touch, and trust.
Helen Keller Services in New York, tasked us with creating a collaborative, immersive escape room that could be navigated entirely without sight.
The users? Teens who were blind or had low vision ; many of whom had never experienced the thrill of a traditional escape room.
What We Got Wrong at First
We started like many early accessibility projects do — with good intentions but the wrong instincts.
Our first instinct was to simplify. Make the puzzles easier. Reduce steps. But in our research — including forums like r/Blind and interviews with real users — one thing became clear:
Blind players don’t want simpler experiences. They want equitable ones.
They want to solve hard puzzles. They want to fail and try again. They want to be challenged — just like everyone else.
We weren’t designing for disability. We were designing for agency and users.
What I Learned About UX (That No Figma File Could Teach Me)
1. Inclusion is not an afterthought. It’s a design principle.
2. Multisensory design is powerful.
Touch and sound aren’t second best alternatives to sight. They’re interfaces of their own - ones that can be just as immersive, emotional, and intuitive.
3. Accessibility is not about “helping” — it’s about trusting.
You don’t need to handhold users. You need to build environments where they can lead.
How You Can Design for Inclusion Today
Whether you’re designing for a banking app or a museum, inclusion should be part of your baseline UX vocabulary.
Here are 3 ways to start:
✅ Use sensory contrast: Don’t rely solely on color. Use audio, texture, size, or vibration to signal feedback. ✅ Design for autonomy: If a user needs help at every step, something’s broken. Good UX empowers. ✅ Invite real users in: Especially disabled users. No simulation replaces lived experience.
A New Definition of UX
It’s how confident someone feels — when they don’t fit your default persona.
To me, UX is about designing trust.
And once you learn to build experiences with your ears and hands — not just your eyes — you start to see things more clearly.
0 notes
shanzefatimajaved · 5 months ago
Text
What is "phygital"?
Today's transforming digital environment sees the merging of the physical and digital worlds—what's increasingly being called 'phygital'—that is reshaping our encounters with art and technology. This convergence offers rich seeds for exploration and almost seems tailor-made for Digital Arts.
Seamless integration of physical and digital elements occurs in phygital art to create immersive experiences. This approach stretches across and beyond the traditional boundaries of art, blending together the tangible materials of our physical world with digital technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and blockchain. The term 'phygital,' in this case, refers to and reflects a harmonious fusion that enhances both the physical and digital realms.
Artists are spurred by the intensified interest in digital art, and especially by the emergence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT's) to merge their digital works into forms that are more palpable. While we persist in probing the confluence of technology and art, the concept of phygital can and should lead to some truly innovative work. To us, the term phygital means taking both the physical and digital medium into account, when constructing an experience. An experience is something that connects on various levels — be it the physiological, the cognitive or the emotional and an experience is truly connective when it happens in real time.
Tumblr media
5 notes · View notes
shanzefatimajaved · 6 months ago
Text
Physicality as a Bridge in a Networked Society
In a networked society, physicality is experienced as a connector between the somatic and the abstract, the concrete and the virtual. It helps to provide a tangible basis for virtual communications and make the interaction more realistic and it makes it easier for people to feel for one another, which might not be easily achieved through texts or images. Such presence contributes a richness of the senses that enhances the feeling of presence, even in collective work environment such as studios or in other synchronous meetings that emulate face-to-face interaction. Finally, being in a physical space within a networked environment is a constant and timely assertion of the possibilities of touch, spatial, and real-time interaction as the drivers of communication and creativity.
2 notes · View notes
shanzefatimajaved · 6 months ago
Text
How does the interplay of digital and physical space affect social worlds? 
Social media is one of the most effective means of activism and organization since people can share their opinions, and organize themselves and their movements across geographical space. However, there are frequent problems with relation between online activism and offline changes, where ‘clicktivism’ and other performative gestures on the internet do not always lead to actual changes in the world. There is a growing trend of overlapping of the physical and the digital environments, which results in a combination of online and offline activism. For instance, the hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, which implies the struggle for black people’s rights, actively employed social networks to plan protests and rallies. In COVID-19 lockdowns proved that people can find connection and belonging through digital platforms. Even so, they cannot substitute direct superficial contact and may lead to perceived social isolation or disillusionment with the physical environment. The continuous use of the Social Networking Sites has also brought changes in social interactions and communication systems in a positive and negative way. The tools of digital activism are social networks, hashtags, stories, petitions, online protests, and other types of electronic disobedience. These enable the activist to disseminate messages, incubate supporters and keep pressure on targets. But there are also lots of drawbacks and difficulties connected with digital activism.These are; oversimplification of issues, fake news, virtue signaling without tangible action, authorities suppressing activism, algorithms restricting activists’ content, activists getting exhausted from constant exposure to social injustice, and corporate or political entities hijacking a movement. Some people questioned whether technology-enforced actions lead to more polarization and “echo chambers’ rather than positive communication. Ultimately, while digital activism has immense potential to raise awareness and mobilize people, it must be coupled with offline organizing and concrete action to create lasting change. There’s a need to critically examine how digital spaces shape our social worlds and to develop strategies that leverage technology’s benefits while mitigating its pitfalls.
1 note · View note
shanzefatimajaved · 6 months ago
Text
How can creative work enhance ethical approaches to tech?
Creative work enhances ethical approaches to technology by embedding intentional friction, promoting diversity, and encouraging mindful engagement. By introducing interruptions—like Nextdoor’s checklists and rephrased prompts—designers slow users down to reflect on biases, reducing harmful actions such as racial profiling. Involving diverse perspectives ensures that lived experiences shape products, minimizing biased outcomes. UX strategies like dialog boxes or warnings nudge users toward critical thinking, as seen in Oakland’s police reform, where reflecting on decisions cut routine stops by 40%. Shifting from seamless automation to mindful design ensures that technology empowers users thoughtfully, fostering ethical interactions and mitigating the risks of bias
1 note · View note
shanzefatimajaved · 6 months ago
Text
What makes the internet “public”? What makes it private?
The public nature of the internet is evident from the availability and accessibility of different technologies that use the internet. The passage also points out that such technologies as cryptocurrency, digital fabrication, and augmented reality are no longer exotic; they are part of the reality of people’s lives, for example, sitting at a cafe or children playing games. These aspects make the internet a public domain since it is almost impossible to access the internet without coming across some content that is not meant for one’s eyes. The availability of some code libraries which are available for download from repositories such as GitHub also suggests a public aspect of the internet. This openness enables fast advancement in technology and the transfer of new technological skills from one context to another. 
On the private side, Radical Technologies shows how some code and functionalities can be only available to the parties that created them. Some code may be patented and licensed only to paying partners making some areas of the internet private and limited. The text also describes the four major tech giants of the Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, known in the text as “the Stacks,” that control much of what we experience in the digital realm. These companies’ dominance over large portions of online services, platforms, and user data indicates a privatization of large parts of the internet. 
Furthermore, the reuse of the code for other purposes, for example, using algorithms for fall detection for crowd monitoring or gender recognition for advertising purposes, suggests how the technologies presented as public can be repurposed for more personal, commercial use. Although the Internet is still open and many of its services are available to the public, the growing influence of major technology corporations and the fact that much of the underlying code and data are proprietary make it more private. 
1 note · View note
shanzefatimajaved · 6 months ago
Text
Technology is a product of culture and as such, it contains cultural assumptions, prejudices and points of view of the designers and developers of the technology. This is best captured in aspects such as; the sexism in the gendered voice of virtual assistants, the algorithms underlying search engines and recommendation systems among others. There are still cases where data sets used in training the AI systems continue to perpetrate histories injustice where the models used are trained to be unjust and in the design choices where some users are valued more than the others. Technology advancement benefits and is developed to represent some groups than others, therefore, the resultant effect is that some groups are privileged than others. Sometimes the economic motivation and self-interest of companies in the tech sector can introduce biases in their design, that prefer interaction or usage over the interest of the user.
2 notes · View notes