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Sara Wachter-Boettcher studies, writes and talks about technology design. To The Best Of Our Knowledge producer Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with her about why digital products are designed the way they are and how those choices are made.
Wachter-Boettcher warns failing to account for the unintended ways technology shapes our lives can cause us pain that might be avoided if we think about how we design digital platforms and apps differently.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Design Choices Impact Our Every Day Lives (Without Us Even Noticing)
Sara Wachter-Boettcher: I think that you can really see bias at play in so many different places in the digital tools that you use every day. You can definitely see it in search engines. If you do a Google image search for a CEO, you are going to get pretty much images of white men; and if you do a Google search for anything related to, for example, black girls, you will get some exceptionally racist results.