Personal Reflection

This chapter spoke to me because it puts words to a feeling I experience constantly: the feeling of being forced into systems that were never designed with someone like me in mind. When Meyer and Wachter-Boettcher talk about “making space for real people,” I don’t read that as just a design principle. I experience it as something physical, emotional, and practical in my everyday life.

Regularly, space is not made for me – In the literal, physical sense, as well as in the digital systems that increasingly control whether I can live, move, study, and succeed.

On a physical level, my connective tissue disorder means I don’t move through the world in a way that fits neat categories. I’m not in a wheelchair, so I’m usually sorted into the box of “able-bodied,” and with that comes an expectation that I can follow standard paths, climb stairs, stand for long periods, move quickly, and endure physical strain without consequence. But my body doesn’t work that way. I exist in an in-between space that most systems don’t acknowledge. Only two categories are usually established: either you are visibly disabled, or you are assumed to be fine. That rigidity mirrors the kind of narrow thinking the authors describe. The world is built for an imagined “default” person, and if you don’t fit that default, the burden shifts onto you to adapt, struggle, or stay silent.

On a more relevant note to this course, though, was how accurately it described my experiences with digital systems. Meyer and Wachter-Boettcher talk about what happens when designs don’t leave room for things to go wrong, and that is where so much of my day-to-day frustration with my phone, computer and the Internet lives. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been trapped in a loop with an AI chatbot over something as simple as a missing order. That frustration very recently escalated into something much more serious when those same kinds of rigid systems started impacting me in the world of immigration, housing, and education. When my student visa didn’t integrate properly into the immigration portal, I wasn’t just mildly inconvenienced, I was suddenly unable to prove my right to rent a flat in England in time for school. Something I think the chapter could have dug deeper into was how “fast” thinking can result in actually dire consequences for the individuals using a product.

This chapter didn’t just educate me about web design, it made me feel seen. It reframed my frustration as something structural, not individual. And it made me feel excited to be on a path where I can make more people like me feel seen with my designs.

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