Benjamin Earl Evans now works as an Inclusive Design Lead at Airbnb. Before that, he has a winding career path as a designer with a background in the performing arts. He pursued his career as an actor, not a designer, from the very beginning. In 2006, Evans graduated from the London Academy of Music & Drama (LAMDA), the oldest drama in the UK, with a degree in Acting. Within several years after his graduation, he quickly realized the high competitiveness in the industry of performing art. So he started studying sales, psychology, and marketing in order to brand himself.
Evans was a self-taught designer. Around the time where Wix and Squarespace don’t exist yet, he learned to design by himself so that he can build up a website. He practiced design approaches during the daytime and spend the evening on stage. Then there was this moment when he came to realize:
“I realized that actually what I loved about acting was this whole process of the craft, of understanding what it’s like to be someone else, of this process that’s rooted in empathy and self-discovery.”
Evans’ journey at Airbnb didn’t start as a designer but as a customer. A few years ago he traveled from London and tried to find a stay through Airbnb. But he got rejected, every time, even though all the hosts had vacancies on their calendars. At that moment, he realized Airbnb’s mission for their customer to “feel belonged” is not to speak to people of color.
Later on, Evans joined Airbnb’s anti-discrimination group whose goal is to provide “equal access” to all customers, regardless of their skin color. Evans and his team created a framework called Another Lens, a research tool that let researchers & designers reflect & confront their biases throughout the creative process. He encourages designers to incorporate these kinds of thinking processes into their daily approaches so that we can shift the human-centered design into the “humanity-centered design”, design that does good for more people than just those that we consider “users”.
Notes: His experience as an actor makes him such a great speaker & storyteller. I really want to share this speech he gave at IXDA where he talked about his journey to “fix” discrimination and confronting bias on the Airbnb platform. A lot of the quotes in the article are from the speech so give it a watch.
https://interaction20.ixda.org/program/negative-space-what-removing-profile-photos-taught-me-about-designs-ability-to-reduce-discrimination
You can also see his design exploration fixing the problem from scratch in this blog post:
https://medium.com/@benjamineevans/project-belong-9ba820e958
References:
Evans, B. (2016, December 23). Project Belong. Retrieved November 25, 2020, from https://medium.com/@benjamineevans/project-belong-9ba820e958
SF Design Week, S. (2020, June 26). InVision Design Better Series: Benjamin Evans: The Power of Inclusive Design. Retrieved November 25, 2020, from https://sfdesignweek.org/invision-design-better-series-benjamin-evans-the-power-of-inclusive-design/
Studio, G. (2020, February). Negative space: What removing profile photos taught me about design’s ability to reduce discrimination – Interaction20. Retrieved November 25, 2020, from https://interaction20.ixda.org/program/negative-space-what-removing-profile-photos-taught-me-about-designs-ability-to-reduce-discrimination
