Ux Australia Audio (from 2015)

What designers must learn from journalists When reporting with integrity, journalists have a plethora of unique research techniques and checks and balances to ensure stories are corroborated, unbiased, facts are being reported on and sources are evaluated, just as designers should always carefully evaluate research and data and be conscious of how information might be swayed by biases or blind spots. Journalists must maintain good relationships and often work together in order to craft a story, and for advocate journalists to create stories that increase knowledge of an issue and effect positive change. Designers can learn a lot from journalism as advocacy, as Buckminster Fuller says, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality, to change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. Journalists have an uncanny ability to simplify the complex - something that designers need to do every day. They’ve had to learn and adapt fast to survive the digital revolution, and d