Lumping, splitting; us and them: How not to be evil with categories

As embodied humans we spend an incredible amount of brain power categorising everything we come into contact with – it’s our way of dealing with huge amounts of detail. As designers, we take this into our work – using categories to make shortcuts and help get our users to the thing they need. This talk is about how categories really work and the consequences of using them: – How we think categories work is quite different to how they actually work in our brains – The consequences of grouping (lumping) and separating (splitting) people for design and policy can be unforeseen, dangerous and evil