Welcome to The Body Copy

The Body Copy is weekly-ish newsletter where I try to keep my feminist marbles as I talk about AI, language, and design. For the most part I try to be calm and reflective, but other times I’ve had too much coffee and not enough snacks and I have THOUGHTS. Either way, I’m here to poke at things. If you like what you read, feel free to share. If you hate it, consider sharing it anyways. As always, thanks for being here.

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There’s a rhythm to standing on the prescipice of something new. There’s a taste, a sound, a specific type of hue to the season changing. In my case, this sense of, my job is changing and I don’t yet fully know how. Or this sense of why is my world so obsessed with AI and what if I can’t keep up.

If you’ve felt that pulse, you know. That discomfort is hard to shake. But with that whirlwind, there’s also a reckoning. A question that begs us to shed, release, and let go of the layers of skin we’ve been hanging on to. What is it about this discomfort that needs to be broken open? Transformed into something better? Made whole?

It’s a soft and vulnerable place to be.

Those of us in tech and design know we’re on the edge of that prescipice. It sometimes feels like we’re fumbling in the dark looking for a light switch. Looking for someone (or something) to make it feel fuzzy and congruent again. But in that fumbling, we’ve been getting really good at doing things that don’t feel true anymore. Past versions of ourselves and our jobs that no longer serve us. Past versions of how we’ve been trained to write, design user experiences, or use specific tools. None of that is really all that relevant anymore. And it feels. So. Wobbly.

As I find myself walking on that wobbly ground, I realize that naming what stays steady and constant helps anchor what feels so shattered. Naming that part of me that grounds me to the here and now, that reminds me that even if I don’t know where I’m headed, there is still a path forward.

This is the nudge. This is the branch I hold onto to stop myself from free falling. This, The Body Copy, is what is being asked of me. I may not get it right. But I am finding my way home.

Mostly, if not always, about the work we as UX writers and designers touch every day.

UX writing and content design. Language. Semantics. Syntax. Word choice. Tone. Voice. Narrative techniques. Punctuation. All the writing tools we reach for on a daily basis.

AI and LLMs. Conversation design. The models we’re training and the systems we’re training to talk to us and at us. The training data, the outputs, the agents, the conversational interfaces. The thing that’s giving me either debilitating anxiety or adrenaline-fueled hype.

Design practices and processes. How we work. How we show up. How we decide what we’re building and who we’re building it for.

Running through it all, what grounds me and keeps me right where I need to be: feminist theory. My lens, my method, my way through which I see all of the above. What I rely on to ask better, sharper questions. What nurtures me, strengthens me, and helps me be courageous.

My reckoning with what is happening with AI and design starts with an idea. Actually, no. Scratch that. It starts with a question. Many, many questions. Some are whispers, some are louder than others. But they’re there. Waiting to be grappled with.

• How do LLMs keep patriarchy and misogyny alive? The training data, the voices, the outputs, the labor put into them, and the assistants they’re performing. Let’s question what we consider to be intelligent. Let’s examine what we mean by context. Let’s unpack, unfold, and question all of it.

• How do UX and conversation design perpetuate gender-based violence?

  • Who lives in the margins? In the edge cases, the outliers, the error states? What would it mean to design from there instead of pretending they’re an afterthought? Exceptions to the “happy path”?

  • How do we inadvertently treat the male experience as the universal norm? It still creeps in. What’s the consequence when it does?

  • What does consent look like in a product? When is it missed? AKA “Are you sure?”

• When is UX writing doing sexist/racist/classist/ableist harm?

  • “Plain” and “concise” as the golden children of good writing come with a lot of gendered, political baggage. And cultural nuance. Don’t even get me started on readability scores.

  • When we say “make it sound human,” we’re assuming a very specific type of human. Nope. Not good enough.

  • What we call “gramatically correct” has a history of power, colonialism, and classism. What does this reveal about ourselves? Who are we afraid to hurt?

  • When are calls to action problematic? When are they acts of care?

• What makes a conversational interface feminist? What does it do, how does it sound, how does it interact? How do we weave in the change we want to see?

There’s so much more. So much more unease. So much more shedding. Not all of it is logical and rational and data-driven. Some of it is. But that’s the point.

I’m building on the work of a lot of people who came before me. The collective, my intellectual predecessors, the ones who built the frameworks I now apply and use. I would not be here without them.

These are some of the principles grounding my thinking, originally crafted by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein:

Examine power.

Question who built the system, who benefits from it, and who’s made invisible by it.

Challenge the hierarchy of knowledge.

Rationality and logic aren’t the only valid ways of knowing. Consider what gets lost when emotion, embodiment, and lived experience are excluded.

Rethink binaries.

User/designer, rational/emotional, simple/complex, neutral/political. Think about what we miss when we insist on opposites.

Embrace pluralism.

Ditch the idea of the universal user, neutral language, default human. It doesn’t exist. There are only specific people in specific bodies with specific histories.

Make context matter.

The context a user brings to a product is the substance. Question everything that surrounds a context window. It’s situated, intersectional, and relational.

Pay attention to the margins.

This is often where the most important design work lives.

I've created this so I can peel back the layers that are holding me back. So I can think and figure out what it is I actually believe about AI, design, and language from a feminist perspective. So I can figure out what I’m missing and where I have yet to learn. But within that internal choreography, I’d love some company. Specifically, from:

• Those of us in the weeds of designing things for others.

• Anyone who’s ever written “friendly” as a style guideline and then wondered what made it friendly and who it was friendly for.

• People who feel the tension between their craft and their conscience.

• Anyone curious about what happens when feminist theory meets a design system.

• Those who want to think critically about AI and design, and then actually do something about it.

Just as a start. I welcome all the thinkers and skeptics and curious risk-takers to pour in.

My hope is to call out what’s broken, yes. Everything’s always in the process of breaking. But what good is pointing out the crack without offering up a way to fix it? How else do we make ourselves whole? Amidst that discomfort, my hope is to offer alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and doing that help stitch together the unraveling threads of this moment.

Our emotional, lived experiences matter. We are real bodies with real histories. In all of these chaotic and uncertain precipices, may we find ways to stay close to each other and to what matters.

For now, welcome to my sandbox. My place to think out loud, change my mind, contradict myself, and keep going. Where I explore what it means to be heart-first.

So, if you’re also sitting with messy, wobbly, and itchy questions about AI and UX and feminist critique and would like some company, come on over. It might suck. It might be prickly and painful and confusing. But it might also be okay. We might also be okay. So, welcome. And thank you.