Reflection: What does my lived experience qualify me for?

In the world of digital communications, there are some skills and qualifications that are hard to quantify, the chief of which I believe is lived experience. Professional experience, knowledge in digital tools, and education, for instance, are objective and easy to measure. But what you have lived through and how that ultimately informs your decision making is purely subjective. What makes this field so interesting is that we are constantly trying to cater to the subjective needs of various audiences while aiming to be as objective as possible in the assessment of those needs. Which begs the questions, to what degree does lived experience qualify someone for this profession?

In the course of my life, I have lived in three distinctly different countries for a meaningful amount of time. I was born in Yerevan, Armenia where I lived for six years. Armenia is a highly homogenous country culturally, ethnically, and religiously. Living here gave me perspective on what it means to have a very firm national identity. For the next ten years, I lived in Windsor, Ontario Canada. Windsor has a notably high immigrant population. Everyone around me was either an immigrant, or parents of immigrants, and English often wasn’t their first language. Living here gave me immense perspective on the various lenses through which people view the world. Lastly, for the last six years, I’ve been living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. What I noticed instantly upon moving to the States was that people’s race and ethnicity were not as heavily tied to their culture as I’d been used to since first-generation immigrants were not as common to second, third, and fourth. There was also a much higher emphasis on a shared national identity and the expectation of assimilation. Living here has given me perspective on individualism and intersectionality.

With all that I’ve experienced and all the unique individuals that I’ve encountered over the course of my life, one would think that this surely puts me at an advantage in this field. After all, if you know your audience, you can better communicate to them—right?

Sort of.

In all honesty, having experienced what I’ve experienced, I’ve had to constantly check myself of this sort of arrogance because I truly believe you cannot rely on hunches to inform your design decisions. People are just way too unique and complicated. The only way to really understand their behaviors and motives is through data because if my lived experience has taught me anything, it’s that there’s a lot more that I need to learn.

However, practically every major tech company right now has made a move towards diversity and inclusivity in the workplace. Surely if a company like Google values diversity in experience, it has to qualify you for something! So what I noticed when I read into Google’s publications on diversity is that they value being data-driven and inclusivity equally. I think what this means at the heart is that these companies value diversity insofar as it leads teams to start asking the right questions. These questions can then be investigated with proper data and analytics.

To conclude, I’m very grateful for my lived experience. While I definitely don’t think what I’ve personally experienced is enough to justify design decisions, it is more than appropriate to use my experience to start asking the right questions. Ultimately in this field, asking questions is the best that we can do.