Q Walker
The Information Architecture of Emojis
In this episode of Brave UX, Q Walker draws a line between circus and UX 🤡, shares their experience of being cyber stalked 💻, and unpacks the IA intricacies of emojis 🦞.
Highlights include:
- What can designers learn from circus performers?
- Why did you start researching the information architecture of emojis?
- Are changes to emojis a form of benevolent censorship?
- What makes the presentation of the gun emoji interesting?
- How has embracing your queerness helped you to reclaim your bravery?
Who is Q Walker?
Since late 2023, Q has been the General Manager of The Circus Hub 🎪, the centre for circus arts in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand.
Before joining The Circus Hub, Q was an Experience Lead at PaperKite , where they plied their trade of UX strategy and UX research to helping brands like the All Blacks, Volkswagen, The New Zealand Ministry of Health, and Hell Pizza 😈, to better serve their customers.
Q’s career in design started in the United States at Fidelity Investments in 2012 📊, where they worked as a Communications Design Manager and - among other things - used UX and graphic design skills to create data visualisations, interactive reports and web app interfaces.
It was during their time at Fidelity that Q both started and completed a Master of Science in Human Factors in Information Design at Bentley University 🎓.
They have also shared their expertise and experiences with audiences at UX New Zealand (more than once) and UXPA’s Boston conference 🎤.
Transcript
- Q Walker:
- It takes some resolve and some bravery, I think, to talk about what you're good at and it takes wisdom and failure along the way to know what you're not good at.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Q Walker. Since late 2023, Q has been the general manager of The Circus Hub, the centre for circus arts in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. Before joining The Circus Hub, Q was an experience lead at Paper Kite where they applied their trade of UX strategy and UX research to helping brands like the All Blacks Volkswagen, the New Zealand Ministry of Health and help Pizza to better serve their customers.
- Q's career and design started in the United States at Fidelity Investments in 2012, where they worked as a communication design manager and among other things use UX and graphic design skills to create data visualisations, interactive reports and web app interfaces.
- It was during their time at Fidelity that Q both started and completed a master of science in human factors in information design at Bentley University.
- A generous giver of their time and experience. Q has taught improv to school kids, violin and viola to young musicians and leadership and communication skills to fifth graders.
- They have also shared their expertise and experiences with audiences at UX NZ more than once and UXPA's Boston Conference and now they're here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Q, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Q Walker:
- Thank you, Brendan. This is such a nice warm welcome.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it's wonderful to have you here. It really is. I've really been looking forward to this conversation and I learned so many wonderful things about you and preparing for today, and one of them was something that I learned firsthand while I was sitting in the audience at UX NZ last year, which was somewhat of a shocking admission that you made at the very start of your talk, which was that you are the proud owner of not just one, but two. You can see where this is going. Two heard goodies.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah. I have a bit of a soft spot for niche musical instruments. I've been a bode string player my whole life, so violin, viola, I dabbled in cello and I just have a real weakness for things with what's called sympathetic strengths, so I have heard any gurneys. I can't play them very well, but I just love them. They're so bizarre. And I also have a Viola Dere, which is a 10 stringed instrument that I made, and I've got a 14 string version of it that's in the works as well. So that was actually what got me through grad school. That was my downtime hobby, was working on this Viola de mote.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow. How long did that take to make?
- Q Walker:
- Well, I didn't make the wooden part, which is a huge load off, but I slowly did all the finishing, the fitting of the bridge, the fitting of all the pegs, stringing all these strings, some of which are played and some of which are not played, so they have to kind of run underneath the fingerboard that you would otherwise press on. It was a long and laborious process and I learned a lot, but gosh, it's fun and I'm really, I'm quite proud of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it as fun as the Gerie song? I don't know if you can recall what I'm talking about. I'm not even sure if that's the exact name, but I listened to that in terms of preparing for today and it's a wonderfully, wonderfully bizarre song.
- Q Walker:
- Yes, yes. Oh yeah, and I just love all things bizarre as well. This is what happens when you grow up in the circus. You develop very niche tastes
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well. Tell me about that growing up in the circus, because obviously as I mentioned in your introduction, you've recently become the general manager of the circus hub, which seems like it from the outside, at least a departure from your career in UX, at least for the moment. What are your circus roots and what prompted you to return to them?
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, it's funny. It's a lot more closely tied than you might think. Just looking at my cv, I like to say that circus was my first UX experience, so from the time I was a child, I was always really attracted to circus arts. My parents are both performers, they're musicians. My mom comes from a long line of theatre people and opera singers and you name it. So there was always going to be stage performing on the cards for me, and yeah, I just fell in love with circus really early on when my parents brought home some Cirque Soleil VHS tapes one day, and I was totally hooked. After much begging and pleading and some perhaps risky self-training, my parents agreed to send me along to a summer programme training in circus arts, and so I was in that programme from my tweens into ageing out at 18.
- It was a youth circus and I've done Tet list tours. I've done shows that perform outside sometimes street performance stuff and performing inner circus ring as well. All this to say that this was my first exposure to UX because when you're in a circus ring or you're out on the street doing busking kind of shows. Your audience is all around you. They see you from every angle, and so there's no hiding, there's no backstage really at the circus can in a tent. You can kind of tuck yourself backstage, but really everything you do has to be considered from every possible viewpoint around you in nearly a 360 degree range. And so when I started down the path of UX, when I went through a visual arts path, visual arts led me to graphic design, led me to start asking some very UXy questions when I was working at Fidelity, led me down the path of getting my master's in science.
- I often reflected like, gee, this is really circusy, this kind of thinking about how are many, many different types of people going to view the same thing from their own various vantage points. And so yeah, I got this role at the Circus hub and in many ways it feels like I've been waiting my whole life to come back to circus. I often wondered what would my life be like if instead of taking a more academic path, I went more aggressively down sort of the circus performing arts pathway and now that I'm in this role, I feel like everything I've done, all the UX, the science, the art, the communications, the speaking opportunities that I've had, this has all been really, it's hard to see, but I'm gesturing with my hands. This has all led down a path that feels like I am prepared now for this kind of role in the circus, which it really fills my cup. It really, really fills my cup and admittedly a lot of things fill my cup. I'm a passionate person, but this has just felt like a really lovely way to get back to my roots while bringing all of the experience along the way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned the need in performing in a circus troupe or as a circus, is it circus artist, circus
- Q Walker:
- Performer? Yes, artist circus.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's this what could feel quite overwhelming, having to consider how you're being perceived from people that are literally in terms of street circus could be all around you. When you are in that mode of performing as a circus artist, how do you manage or regulate the situation that you're in?
- Q Walker:
- It's the same with circus as it is with acting and performing music and public speaking, all of which are other things I do, which is that you get into the groove of it and you adapt in real time to the feedback that you're getting. It feels a lot like when you've, so I'm a UX researcher, I specialise in qualitative and I love doing interviews so many of us do doing user facing interviews. It feels a lot like that, and if your audience understands what that's like, they will understand what this performing aspect is like because your mind is almost on 110% for this brief time. It's like you know what? You're there to do the steps you need. Ideally, if you've prepared a really well, if you've got a really well prepared interview, you have a really solid understanding of what you're trying to achieve and as the pathway of asking questions to get to those results. Meanwhile, you're also reacting in real time to what feedback you're getting from the participant, and you might also be liaising with a research assistant who might be backstage. I'm putting that in air quotes for your audio. It's very comparable. It's like your brain is switched on and you're in this groove where you know what you're doing, you have the support around you to do it, and you're just, now you're in this setting where it's about delivering on that while adapting to feedback you're getting in the moment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And how does that compare and contrast with the role that you find yourself in now within circus, which is that general management role, how is it different or perhaps how is it similar to the role that you were performing as an artist?
- Q Walker:
- It's a lot lonelier, I will say, because it's a circus school, so it mostly operates in evenings, but I work during the day, so a lot of the time my work is sort of in an office by myself, but it's really important that I am there because people do come in and out of the space and people come to me with their problems or concerns or wins and celebrations, and so it's important that I'm there to be part of all of that happening in real time. I think some of the similarities include I have a really supportive team. Ideally, I know for a lot of UX researchers who are trying to tough it out on their own, which I did for a long time, you don't necessarily have that team, but if you are embedded, if you are lucky enough to be embedded in a team, you have that support all around you and you know where you fit.
- Same with performing. If you're performing in a team or even if you're performing solo, you've got people off stage who are also supporting you. This is a lot like that. I have a role that I play in this ecosystem and I have to adapt very quickly to real time events that happen. Heaven forbid someone gets an injury, you have to shuffle stuff around for that, and so there's a lot of ruthless prioritising. I will say. It comes from, it's a term I'm borrowing from my UX time, but this sense of teamwork and the sense of being supported and knowing where you fit and knowing who's around you to help and what all of their roles are and knowing how to raise your hand when there are gaps, I think all of that is very much in sync.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you ever find yourself compelled or feel a draw to perform in the circus again directly? Yeah,
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, I do. I do, and I'm lucky. I'm in a space where if I want take a tight wire break, I can take a tight wire break. I'm a wire walker. My tight wire is in the space, my personal one that I moved to New Zealand with me, I have the luxury of being able to do that. I can also take upside down breaks on the trapeze when I need to. All of that is a little bit on hold right now where I'm pregnant, and so I found my balance is off. My blood pressure is different. There's a lot of different concerns here that are changing, but yeah, and just last November I was in a show that was clown. It was a clown show, theatrical clown, so slightly different rules from circus clowning, but the same basic world, the same basic principles and
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Can I stop you there? That's fascinating. Yeah, sure. I don't actually understand what the difference between theatre and a circus clown would be in terms of the rules. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah,
- Q Walker:
- Yeah. I'm by no means an expert and there's many different schools of thought. Clowning is an art form that goes back as far as pretty much as far as civilization does. So we've always had performers and theatrical clown relates to circus a little bit. Audience relationship is slightly different. We're talking fine differences here because it's all clown, and so by clown we mean there's something sort of comedic happening, and so we can at least start there and say, okay, your relationship with the audience is that there's going to be something comedic in circus clowning the clown is sort of the audience surrogate, and so when you are watching these really high stakes acrobatic acts or aerial feats can, it can be stressful on an audience. Literally your heart rate is going up. I'm sure there's some cool UX, so I could study around that, and so clowns help be an audience surrogate on the stage and share some of that reaction.
- One of my favourite descriptions of clowning, I don't think this is exclusive to Circus Clown, but the quote is, clowning exists at the intersection of hope and incompetence, and so that's what we see in the theatre as well. We see theatre clowning where there might not be other acts that the clown is offsetting, but they're still playing this role of there's trying and there's failing and there's checking in with the audience to see how they like it, and it's constantly about finding games, finding little games to play with the audience and on stage, so it's really fun. I didn't like clown when I was a kid. I started as a contortionist. I did some flying trapeze for a while that really called to my heart, and then I got tall and a little less nimble and I really gravitated towards tight wire, but I always kind of thought like, oh, clowning is a little too low brow for me or whatever. I don't know what I was thinking. It is the most challenging circus art and it is serious and it is risky and it has a lot to teach us, so I'm glad I came around to clown.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm never going to be able to look at the clowning the same way in a good way. I never really truly understood until you explain that, that they really are, it sounds like to me anyway, that bridge between the rest of the performers in the audience. And you're right, that is a really tenuous and tricky role to play because it's so live and probably to a large degree, I'm projecting a lot here, but probably has to unfold in an unscripted, unprepared for manner. You have to be probably, I would imagine quite loose when you're interacting with the audience. You
- Q Walker:
- Have to be so empathetic as a clown because if you miss the mark, if you misread the audience vibes, it's really hard to recover from that and clowns are already punching up, I think because there's so much bad press around clowns. Yes,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a few movies that haven't helped their claws.
- Q Walker:
- Look, I love Stephen King, but I can see where people have sort of emotional walls they put up around thought of clowning and fear of clowns is real, so the audience isn't always with you as a clown, particularly if you're wearing makeup in a red nose and all of that. The stereotypes come in. I luckily have been able to perform clown in different makeup with different visual vocabulary, so this past show I did The Clown was all drag, which for me as a gender queer person is kind of a question mark anyways. Yeah. But yeah, there's a lot there. There's a lot there and there's a lot of places where clowning can fail, so it's a hard job.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about trying various performing roles in the circus until you found the one that you felt most comfortable in, which spoke to me that there's an eclectic mix of people with a performing troop. What makes it all work?
- Q Walker:
- Communication is a really big one, and sometimes that's hard because circus is very global. It's a very international community. A lot of the time you have people you don't speak the same language with, and so communication is really big and trust, like flying trapeze, if you're going to be flying from one rig onto another, essentially into someone's arms, you have to have established trust with that person or else the whole thing falls apart. It's a small industry, it's a global industry and it's a high risk environment, and so the importance of trust and safety, I can't understate or I can't overstate how important it is.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are there any observations through your own experience working in circus around fostering and creating that trust, that connection with your other performers that you feel in the corporate design world would service well if we could take some of that forward and apply it in our day-to-day jobs?
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, yeah, there's lots there. Actually, when I was at Fidelity, we did TED Talks and I was part of the first cohort of TED speakers and because it's a very risk heavy environment, they didn't let us publish them properly, but we had Ted, like TED coaches, presentation coaches and all that, and it was quite well done. As part of that first cohort, I was able to come in and do a talk about what circus has taught me that I have taken into the corporate world and trust your teammates was one of my principles of course, but another one is to know your style, and I think this actually goes a long way towards building that trust and communication. In circus, one of the ways people communicate is through their expression, through their bodies, so much of the way the body moves is so universal in expressing joy or grief or territorialness.
- The attitude that you convey with your body is so much, and so a lot of the time what circus performers will do when they're forming a new troop is literally just watch each other, show what you've got and work from there and try to build a show on top of those existing strengths. And I think there's something there that corporate design can take from that, which is around understanding the key strengths of every person on that team, making sure that they get a chance to shine and demonstrate what they're capable of right away, so you're not waiting to tease that out, but really saying, okay, we have a new person on the team, or Look, we're in the position of creating a whole new team and we're all new to this. Let's all really talk about our strengths before we do anything else. What do we bring here?
- And that helps us understand how we relate to each other. This I think is as an American who's now been in New Zealand for six years, I do think New Zealanders are a little bit hesitant to do that kind of thing because I don't know much of how many of your listeners are in UA or Australia, but the tall poppy syndrome is real and I think people don't want to talk about their strengths. And so part of the way I'm resolving this at the Circus Hub because I'm working with a bunch of, they are circus performers, but they're a lot of Kiwis is saying, okay, we're creating an environment where it's safe to talk about our strengths. Let's actually toot our horns a little bit. Let's talk about what each person is really, really good at and make sure that we give that person opportunities to thrive and shine. Whether that is with teaching certain classes or engaging with the community or helping out the hub behind the scenes, it is totally applicable. You can drop it into pretty much any context. It takes some resolve and some bravery I think to talk about what you're good at and it takes wisdom and failure along the way to know what You're not good.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think you're a hundred percent correct and in my observation, Kiwis are more comfortable with other people tooting their horns than they are with tooting their horns themselves. There's definitely a guardedness that we have around that we're not proud and not as outspoken about our own abilities,
- Q Walker:
- Which is a really precious and wonderful thing, and I would not advocate for us to change that,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But we could dial it up a little bit is what I'm hearing.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, I think so. I think, I think it goes a long way towards helping people feel like they've landed in the right place. You can know from an individual process of interviewing into a company or a team or whatever, you can feel good individually about the decision you've made to join a team, but if we don't make a stink about it, when that person arrives what they're really, really good at, then we're putting them in the position of having to prove themselves really early on. I don't think that's fair and I just don't think that's fair.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Potentially not productive either. So making me think a little bit about this activity that you've talked about there, about getting really clear on what our strengths are, almost like mapping that so that you can find a way within the team to work better with each other. All of that's good stuff, but it ties into this line of thinking and say cross-functional collaboration where often you might have an engineer, a designer and a product person talking about something, just using words, leaving thinking that they've gotten on the same page together, but actually left with fundamentally different interpretations of what it is that they've said. And it was really interesting to hear you talk about the observational role that circus performers will play when they're trying to assess whether they can work with someone else. They actually will look at them and see how they move and how they perform. We don't often get that luxury yet. It's a far more expressive way of assessing someone's abilities. And of course in circus it's really important because it's a physical type of thing that you're doing, but it does make me wonder what the role of visualisation or some other kind of design tool can be in terms of making that collaboration smoother sooner for people in corporate.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, I have some thoughts on this. Having been a hiring manager in the UX industry for some time, and I feel ambivalent about designer portfolios, I feel like it can only teach you so much. And yet our graduates coming out of school programmes are being told if you want to go into design, you have to have this big portfolio. And look, I went to art school. I know the importance of a portfolio as one way of catching attention in a big pool potentially of candidates, but it can be misleading and I think one of the ways we can mitigate it is as part of interviewing people, put play into the process and try to find people's strengths by giving them a playground that they can of explore and ideally with the rest of the team as well. Again, if it's someone new coming into an existing team, what can we do to just let our guard down, get out of interview mode and best self, best self, best self, and actually just allow them to demonstrate in a real context how they might approach a certain problem or how they might work with the rest of the team.
- I find that kind of exercise to be really valuable.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was speaking with Andy Vitale not that long ago, and Andy's currently, I think his role as chief design officer at Constant Contact, and he was explaining to me that in interview sessions, it's not unusual for him to step in and help someone along if he can see that they're starting to drown and hearing what you're saying there about introducing more play, giving people a stage, if you will, to demonstrate their strengths. That spoke to me of what Andy had said about it's also okay, an interview to stop being your best self and being the person that's the adversary, and actually to step in and give someone like you would imagine on stage, whether it's theatre or in circus, give them a hand so that the show can go on. Yeah, truly you don't really want the whole thing to fall apart just because someone's having a mind blank.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah. It's funny you bring up the word adversary because interviews in general can be kind of adversarial and if we're not careful, that can spill over into the workplace as well and affect how people feel about each other on a team if they've been through this process that puts the new candidate against, oh, I have to keep fighting. They keep throwing these challenges at me and I have to win. I have to get the job I have to win. It can set people up for the wrong tone into their role. I don't have anything really saged to say there, but only just a nod of recognition that that's not ideal.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's stay on circus a little bit longer before we move on to something else. One of the things that I learned about you and nicknames can be either a good or a bad thing depending the place from which they come, but I learned that you had a nickname when you first joined the circus, but I wasn't sure what that nickname was. It didn't come up in what it was that I was reading. What was that nickname and how did it come to be?
- Q Walker:
- What's the context that you read this in because that might help.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I believe it was in the UX P'S Boston conference. There was a blurb about you, and I think it's featured somewhere else, that it mentioned that there was a nickname that you had when you first joined the circus.
- Q Walker:
- Interesting. So my nickname Q didn't come about during the circus, and actually my friends in the circus know me by my dead name, which is quite interesting. So Q is something that I chose for myself as part of my transition into, I went to boarding school when I started high school and there were too many people who shared my name for my taste and I was accustomed to being somewhat, and so I mangled the spelling of my own name and put a Q in it on the first day of orientation and it spread like wildfire. So that's sort of my primary relationship with my nickname. I did briefly have a nickname that was given to me by a Russian coach, but it's probably not something I would've shared wildly, but I used to wear a little necklace every day with the turtle on it, and so they called me chi, which means turtle in There you go. Mangling that pronunciation. But yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I won't have to go and fire my researcher then, who's myself. There was something there. There was something there.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Q, you mentioned that you've been in New Zealand for, I think it was six years or so. You're originally from New Hampshire, which is a state I understand, just north of the city of Boston. Yep,
- Q Walker:
- Yep. It's north of Massachusetts, which houses Boston. Yep.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Got it, got it, got it. I don't imagine there's much in common between New Hampshire and New Zealand, but I could be wrong. What was it that brought you here? Why is this now your home?
- Q Walker:
- I was brought here by happenstance and luck, which it is just so much of my life as could be described in that sort of being in the right place at the right time. I was really happy where I was and I was putting down roots. I wasn't looking to move. I owned a house, granted I was working in Boston and I had to move back to my home state of New Hampshire in order to afford set house, and so I had a very long commute and yeah, I was really happy at Fidelity. I still really love Fidelity and I went to a conference, let's not get it twisted. I am not a Forbes 30 under 30, but I went to a Forbes 30 under 30 conference in Boston and met the founder, and I think he's still the CEO of a company here in Wellington that wanted to try bringing UX into their offerings.
- And so we started the conversation initially, I was like, oh, that's cool. That's just kind of flattering how cool, cool it is to be considered. And then we actually started getting more serious in the chats. It was a couple day long conference and we would meet up every day and chat and discuss our thinking, and I ended up interviewing for the role and got it and came here, picked up my life, sold my house, moved abroad, and it was like from the moment I got off the plane, I just knew Ro was it. Sometimes you go to a place and you feel like, I want to care for this place. So something about New Zealand really just clicked for me and it really speaks to my heart. I think the people here are absolutely amazing. The qualities we were talking about humility earlier, part of the tall poppy thing is that can be something that again, from my American perspective might hold us back in terms of some workplace conversations.
- It is based in the most amazing humility and kindness and care that Kiwis sort of inherently carry with them. And I got off the plane, I breathed really nice fresh air. I met the most wonderful people, and I was like, this is home. This place is just home. And there's parts of it that remind me of my favourite childhood memories of being in the circus. I was out in a rural area, really beautiful environment to be a kid in, really beautiful, and the community was so nurturing in the circus as well. I think there's a little bit of that here where it's like this is just a place where someone can thrive. If it clicks, it clicks, right? So yeah, so I came for a role basically, long story short, I came for a role and then I just fell in love with this place, and now I'm a permanent resident and establishing roots and about to have a Kiwi baby, and I have my partner here who's also a migrant, and every single day we're thankful to be here. We both had to sort of fight through the systems of immigration, et cetera, to stay here and to prove that we wanted to be here. And we're just so grateful that we are.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That struggle is definitely real with the immigration side of things. We've got some friends at the moment, different groups of friends that are going through the similar struggle. You've just been speaking about the brightest side of human nature. There is a darker side to human nature as well. And something that you shared with me about this conversation today when we were talking about doing this was that you keep a low key profile online.
- Q Walker:
- I do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- By design. Yeah. Why is that?
- Q Walker:
- Forgive me because this isn't a story I talk about very often, but it really relates to UX and sort of what we're talking about here, but being a kid on stage and getting exposed to all of this, being looked at from every angle and thinking about the audience all around you, I was quite comfortable being sort of in the public eye. And then in high school I was pretty brutally cyber stocked, and it was by someone I knew personally who was hiding who they were online, and it was something that in today's parlance, we would call gaslighting as well, and it was in the early two thousands and we didn't really have a lot of vocabulary for what this was yet. It was a really scary time, and I think back to that period, and I was a high schooler, a lot is already going on. When you're in high school, there's a lot of things and a lot of emotions and you feel things really hard, but I look back at that time and I see a kid who was in crisis and was really, really vulnerable, and that has coloured my experience into adulthood and continues. I keep finding new ways that it's like, oh yeah, oh, why do I do that thing? Oh, maybe I was stalked. It really has coloured my journey into adulthood.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How has it coloured it?
- Q Walker:
- QI already know that I was prone to anxiety before that, but I have a lot of anxiety now and a lot of my anxiety journey has involved fear of being watched or fear of even being seen, which has also been an interesting journey the last as I've journeyed into my professional career, and you need to be seen to a certain extent in order to be conventionally successful. But yeah, so I have a very, very low profile by design on social media. If you are my friend and you're let into that circle for the people who are in that loop just like anyone else, I just post whatever important things to me, et cetera, but I have a really strong barrier up around who I let in. It's sort of a privilege to I treat my social media presence as a privilege that I only share with certain people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are a performing artist in terms of a musical artist. You're obviously someone. We're sitting here recording a podcast, so this is going to be public as well. I've seen you on stage deliver talks. How do you manage that? Do you compartmentalise the experience you had as a high schooler and compartmentalise that to online life only, or have you found that it's seeped into how you feel when you are doing something like this? Say for example with me,
- Q Walker:
- I do this kind of thing very deliberately to counter that, to counter the fear that I was taught because I have a lot of joy and passion to share and I have to make a choice of, so am I going to hide that and keep it all to myself for fear of being seen, for fear of being in any sort of public eye, or do I say fear be damned, I'm going to do it anyways. Part of the UX New Zealand talk I gave last year, I used that as an opportunity to talk about trans rights and to share my own experience as a non-binary person. And I had so many sleepless nights before that saying, am I really going to do this? Why am I doing this? Kind of all of that fear. And then I decided, you know what? I'm going to do it anyways because I want to be the voice that I needed to hear when I was younger.
- And so when I am on stage and when I am, whether that's in an acting role or a public speaking role, or I'm speaking really as myself from my heart, I try to be the person I needed when I was younger. Representation is really important. I think a lot of the cyberstalking experience made me feel like I shouldn't be part of the online world made me feel like I should just be sort of hammered into a little corner. It really beat me. I'm using violet language here, but it really kind of beat me down from being this really expressive, exuberant kid who kind of was brave on stage and feeling like I can share who I am. Suddenly I felt like that was ooh, suddenly inherently really dangerous. And so part of my life's journey has been to say, okay, I acknowledge that fear. I acknowledge that anxiety.
- I'm still smart about what I post online. I still try to be quite sensible about information that I share with others, but look, the world needs diverse voices and I have a part to play in that as well. Would I want anyone else to shut up because they felt unsafe? No. I would rather put myself out there a little bit to help others, all of the same steps. I'm really, really honoured that after UX New Zealand, someone approached me and came out to me during that conversation, and even if it's just one person like that, it's like, oh my gosh, I did my part in this moment to help someone else feel safe and feel legitimate and feel like it's possible to be who you are and to bring your full joyful self into the spaces you inhabit. Yeah, ultimately that's more important to me than the fear, and I constantly have that little nagging sense in the back of my mind like, oh, am I messing it up? Is this a reckless choice that I've made? And I just have to keep telling myself, there's no other way for me to live. I value honesty. I value transparency. I value authenticity, and in order to live by those values, I can't be hiding all the time. Does that make sense? Again, this is a story I don't tell often, so it's kind of
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It does. It does.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about this person you mentioned it was someone that you knew, have they ever been fully aware of just what impact it had on you?
- Q Walker:
- I don't know, and I will never know, and that's okay. I've made peace with that. I really don't know, and is it my place to know? Do I need them to know? No, because my journey is shaped by my experiences and their journey will have been shaped by their experiences, and yeah, there's nothing really to be done. You can't force someone else to understand what you've been through. I think it's an unwise way of thinking that you can make other people know what you've been through. So no, I don't know. I don't think I can know, and I don't care to change that because I actually quite like who I am and I quite like where I've landed at this point in my life and my journey is my own, and that's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That. The reason why I was asking about whether or not they were fully aware is I was curious as to whether or not there was some sort of restorative justice that had taken place after that. But it was interesting to hear you say there that you like who you are, your journey is your own, because I was also curious as to whether or not with the path that you've travelled since, whether you would change it knowing the impact that you've managed to have on people as a result of the stories and things that you've been telling.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, I would certainly change some of my own actions, I think, but overall, I think it's been important when I think back on what would I change about my life, it's like, oh God, I was so mean to that person, or rude or I said such a stupid thing or whatever. But ultimately that's part of growing is making these mistakes, making these missteps and actually feeling regret over them is part of how you're growing is saying like, Ooh, I wouldn't make that decision now. And also giving myself the grace of knowing how I am today is not even necessarily how I would act tomorrow. Constantly improving. We all should be constantly improving, and I'm sure there's stuff I'm doing right now that I'll look back on and say, oh, that was cringe, but that's part of the journey. I'm quite philosophical and I think when I reflect on my experience, I don't really think there's much I would change. It's all part of living a full life.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You told me on email about the cyber stalking that, and I'll quote you now actually, I think it's probably best that you hear your own words here. Sure. You said perhaps counterintuitively embracing my queerness has helped me reclaim some of the authenticity and bravery that I had lost. Just tell me about that.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, I have some complicated feelings around this, but I stand by that that I think actually celebrating my own queerness, so I'll back up. I am non-binary and I present very femme. For those of you who or viewers who are watching the video, you'll see I'm in sort of traditionally femme presenting clothes, bright fun earrings, and so I'm aware of how I present. That's how I sort of navigate the world back in the 2010s, probably mid 2010s, the public discourse in the states started bringing up vocabulary like non-binary and gender queer and things that we just didn't have words for before, or at least not at the level of visibility that they had been. And so it was a thing that I just in my own time for a couple of years, I would privately put this hat on and just see this identity hat of saying, what do I like about this?
- What don't I like about this? What in here calls to me? And eventually I found that for the most part, the hat fits and it just actually seems very authentic to who I am and what I believe in context of these public conversations that we're having about gender and roles, et cetera. Growing into that has been a big long process. I was closeted for a long time. I only came out at work for the first time in 2019, so it had already been five years of just me being sort of closeted, and then I'm only really now starting to talk about it publicly. I mean, last year at UX N said, that was a very emotional presentation for me because I chose to be vulnerable about who I am in that, and this is certainly the first podcast I, I've openly discussed it, and the more I grow into it and the more I claim it, the less I have to actually think about it really because for anyone who's in the closet, you'll know it really puts psychological pressure on you, and it doesn't do anything good for if you're someone like me who regularly brushes with anxiety and fears of being seen and observed.
- And so I'm really, really lucky. I'm in a place where Wellington, New Zealand is pretty much the friendliest place you can get in terms of being your rainbow self. But being able to bravely assert myself and realise that a lot of cyberstalking and the bullying that happens online is often used to oppress minority voices, it's a major tactic for silencing people. And for me to actually own who I am, whether it's my fem side or my full queerness, being able to sort of own that gives me a sense of bravery of saying, well, I don't have to dance that dance that the bullies want you to dance. I don't have to be the kid that's beaten into a corner and feels like they can't be themselves. It's actually important to own it and speak up and contribute your voice when possible. So that's part of my journey as well. Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's talk about you owning that. You mentioned your talk at UX nz a couple of times, and that talk was called the one last year was called emoji ia. What is a lobster? And in that talk, it was a wonderful talk. You explored some of the research that you'd conducted into the ia, the information architecture of, I believe there's three and a half thousand or so different emojis that are out there. What got you curious enough to want to do that?
- Q Walker:
- It's funny because in my talk, the first maybe 15 minutes of the talk is exploring this topic, and then I back up and I say, so why would I do this? I discovered it because of the simple fact that the lobster emoji in 2018 was hotly debated topic in particularly trans and gender career communities because in that release, in that unicode emoji release, all the pride flag, the trans pride flag petitions had gone ignored. But there were some lobster fisher people who successfully campaigned that the lobster is sufficiently different from the crab,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The state of Maine, right?
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, it's really funny. And so there was sort of this outcry of injustice of saying, where's the love for humans if lobsters can be given their own emoji sufficiently different crusta, but there's no love for the trans pride flag. And so I am one of many people who sort of adopted the lobster emoji around the time that was happening, and I've continued with it. I love the history of it. I think it's great. And part of the reason I think it's great is because we do have a happy ending to this story. The next release, Unicode released the trans pride flag. So now we can look back on it as this was successful, this campaign worked because as someone who uses the lobster emoji regularly, I would find it popping up in different areas in different systems. So you have your little emoji keyboards or you have your apple sort of offers you a panel of emojis that you can kind choose from. And I noticed it was bouncing around a lot between is the lobster food or is the lobster an animal? And that piqued my curiosity. And so I independently just started studying the architecture of these keyboards and these platforms to figure out what are the attitudes towards how these essentially hieroglyphs are presented to us, and what does that reveal about how we make sense of all this imagery? And so that's a fun little pet project of mine that I really enjoy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm not sure if you coined these terms or not. So tell me if you did or didn't. But I believe at your first glance, you saw them separated into two distinct ways or categories of making sense of all the emojis. One was explicit and the other was implicit. What do you mean by those terms?
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, explicit and implicit. The explicit path is where you take what the emoji literally represents and you put it together. One of my favourites is the red lantern emoji, which in explicit systems, this red lantern sort of Asian style red lantern is put in with other lighting because it is a source of light and it is what it says on the tin in implicit categories. You see that in the party area because that's actually a Japanese bar sign that indicates like, oh, this is part of what you would do at a festival is a good time thing. And so that's one example of how decisions are made about the usage of characters. And so are we going to see this emoji used as it is as an item? And is that where people are going to look to find it or are we going to incorporate how it's sort of used culturally? I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to any of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a third way though, isn't there? And that's the way that you were describing that the trans community began using the lobster emoji, and I think you called that social usage.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, social usage. We're seeing that with the watermelon emoji as well. The watermelon emoji has been similarly sort of taken and used culturally as a statement about Palestinian Israeli conflict. We see examples of this all the time where emoji are taken by a group of people who have a shared understanding of something, and the emoji becomes shorthand for your skin. And I don't think there's any way reasonably you could set up an emoji keyboard or an IA system that accommodates that perfectly because part of human nature to play with those meanings and to use them accordingly. But it is really interesting to see when you see emoji in the wild and trying to figure out what that context is.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Q as a non-binary person who's also participated your whole life from what it sounds like, or at least for a long time in performing arts, how do you feel about the gendering of certain emojis? And in particular, the one that I'm thinking of here is the ballet shoe,
- Q Walker:
- The gendering of particular emojis. That's an interesting question. And my stance on that involves unpacking, I think gender in a holistic sense.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Buckle up people. Yeah, buckle
- Q Walker:
- Up. I'll relate it back to something I'm currently experiencing, which is growing a baby inside me. And I'm having conversations with people like medical providers, other people in my circle, and we talk about things like maternity, and we use words like motherhood. And it's really striking for me as someone who has sort of opted out of those gender roles to suddenly be in this world that is really, really gendered and very difficult to sort of pick apart from gender expectations. And so in my case, I've worked on mentally separating mother as a word, the gender implications versus the role that it fills. And so if that makes sense. And it's complicated because when little kids ask, so where do babies come from? A lot of the time the answer is, well, when a mommy and daddy love each other very much. And so you're using those roles to actually substitute for gender or a biological sex in this case.
- So to track back to emoji, I would challenge whether the ballet shoes emoji is explicitly gendered or not. I think we have cultural connotations of point, shoes being something that baller nas wear, so traditionally female presenting female dance style that has been trained in the ballet tradition, we might associate that with femininity, but they're just shoes and they serve a role in a performing arts world. And there's also traditional roles as well as a lot of upcoming emerging roles in the ballet space for men to wear point shoes as well. So it's interesting when we look at it in that context of like, okay, so what are we saying when we say this is gendered? Is it a reflection of the emoji or is it a reflection of us? And usually the answer is, it's a reflection of us.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's not always the reflection that we care to see. Yeah.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah. I think we're on a journey with that publicly. I go back to the social discourse and it's hard to rewire programming, and it's hard even for the most earnest people. I have friends who accidentally slip up and use her pronouns for me all the time. It's fine. I know their heart's in the right place, and it's really hard to reprogram. And again, especially knowing the way I look and talk and present myself, I'm aware that I fall into something that is maybe stereotypically seen as feminine. And so I think it's important to give each other a little grace and say, we're all on a learning journey together. We're all doing this together.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanted to take a little bit of a detour here and still stay with you on this topic of emojis and ia. Sure. And talk to you about, you mentioned social discourse, you mentioned Israel, Palestine. There's a bunch of things that have in recent memory gone on in the world and are still going on in the world, and the jury's out as to whether or not we'll continue to have those sorts of things go on after and when we are long gone. One of the things that you picked up in your talk was the categorization. In fact, I think it was the categorization and or presentation of the gun emoji.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah, interesting one.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What's the story there?
- Q Walker:
- I'm trying to figure out where to start with it, because quite complex. So Unicode releases these emoji codes and basically says, Hey, you basically put this input in. It will show an icon, and in this case, let's talk about the gun. And then it's up to the platform that is tapping into Unicode structure to then present their version of what a gun in this case looks like. I might be getting some of the details wrong on there. I would love to actually talk to Unicode about how all of this works, but that's my understanding. And so the choice of how you present an icon like that is really, really important. We've seen it with the gun. We've also seen it with the syringe emoji, the gun emoji. If you look at it now on most of the major platforms, it now looks clearly like a toy water gun, like a little party favour type, tiny handheld gun that has been plainly designed in bright green to look like a toy.
- That is not always the case. Historically, it looked more like a firearm, and it still lives, depending on which system you're looking at, it still lives in the weapons category alongside other similar items like the bomb emoji, for example. So that's an interesting case of the icon itself changing and the systems that support emoji changing the icon to help to mitigate some of the contest around it culturally, some of the difficulty in discourse and trying to help make the internet a more safe place that has its own pros and cons in its own way. People are complicated and people have very strong stances on emoji. The syringe one is another example I really like because there is one syringe emoji in Unicode, at least as of my most recent recollection. But syringes are used for different things in the real world. And so what used to be a syringe that was full of a red liquid that was implied that it's blood, that because people were talking about suddenly vaccination so much during covid and our recovery from that, it really, really mattered whether the syringe emoji was depicted as containing red liquid or containing sort of a clear or bluish liquid.
- And so one organisation or one person can send out one tweet or one Facebook post or one whatever, but depending on the system that the reader is using that will actually control which version of the emoji they see, not the original intent. So there's also been a lot of conversation around, okay, so is it in the public's best interest to remove the blood connotation because it is a public health crisis, and so we need to soften the associations with this emoji a little bit. It is really interesting how these things come up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So in that sense, it sounds like these changes, for example, making the gun into a toy, changing the nature of the liquid and the syringe, this is potentially provocatively framed the way I'm going to deliver this, bring it on, but are these types of changes to presentation of emojis, the kind that were instituted say by apple, and then others followed suit? Are these a form of benevolent social engineering or censorship,
- Q Walker:
- You could say? Yes. One of the interesting stops on my academic journey at Bentley University was studying business ethics, basically ethics in sort of a corporate context. And in that I learned a lot about what are corporation's responsibilities to participate in the conversation. And I think this is an example of that. This is an example of having to make an ethical judgement about what is going to be the safest for the majority of people, what's going to improve health and safety the most, and not having been in those conversations. I would have a strong hunch that that's the guiding principle within those. I do believe this is not contentious at all. I do believe corporations have ethical responsibilities and decisions that are made in those meeting rooms are impactful and have real practical meaning in the outside world. And so yeah, I believe it is something to be taken very seriously by the platforms and by the designers of emoji just as much as it is important for us to understand how we use them and how we communicate them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The gun ones the interesting one. I mean, it's all interesting, but the one that I find most interesting is the changes made to the gun emoji. And there's a lot of context that I won't have, and so fill me in here if I'm wandering way off and saying things that I could be better informed on. But I wonder just what impact that had on public safety. And my cultural reference point is, and I'm probably showing my age here a little, so I'm 39, is when I think back to ID software who published games like Doom and Quake, and the uproar that went through, I think it was at the time, it was kind of Bible Belt Middle America, about the violence that was portrayed in the computer games. And it was somewhat associated with the Columbine shooters as well, who had been people who had played that game.
- And there was outcry about violent video games and whether or not they were predisposing teenagers, generally young, white males to become violent individuals. And from my recollection, the research into it was not that anyone could tell from the research that was done. And so that one's interesting for me because I don't fully understand why it needed to change. I can only suspect that perhaps the context of use Twitter being, well, what was Twitter being becoming quite a vile place. I can imagine that that gun emoji was used in a threatening context between people as opposed to a computer game, which is consumed by an individual or experienced by a select group of individuals who have bought into that premise of being in that violence. So I don't really have a question here, but it was just something I wanted to bring up with you. I was curious to get someone else's take, and in particularly yours, because you've looked into this quite intently, what is your take on what I've just said?
- Q Walker:
- I agree with your observations, and if I recall correctly, the move to change the gun to be more of a water gun happened I think as a result of Sandy Hook Elementary School, which was obviously a high profile school shooting. I may not have the timelines right there, but my recollection suggests that, and I think there's a bigger question around, so even if an organisation that's responsible for design emojis or supporting the way they're displayed, what is their responsibility for how that image is displayed? But also, does it change anything practically if we're all using a gun, a water pistol? But we know that there's this other connotation of let firearms
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Social usage, but it's flipping social usage.
- Q Walker:
- Yeah. So it raises interesting questions about does it matter and what do we do anyways, whether or not we think it matters, and this is where I would lean towards ethics to help us navigate that conversation. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, Q, that's a wonderful place for me to ask you a final question today, and I'm just going to quote something that you've previously said before I ask you that, and that was just like any ia, the IA of emojis is one way that humans make sense of a really nuanced world. Through our attempts to categorise everything, we can see something about ourselves reflected in the IA that we create. So my question is, what is it that you hope more designers or anyone for that matter who may be listening today will see in themselves or at least consider when they're creating IA and experiences for other people?
- Q Walker:
- I think the implication is that as a lot of UXers know, a lot of UX researchers know the decisions that we make have to be tested with many people. I think design is still kind of figuring this out. I think design has come a long way as an industry to embracing some of this principle, but having one person sitting and making the decisions about how an IA should be designed is insufficient. It's plainly insufficient. In a world as diverse and as online as we are, I would highlight the importance of having a lot of different perspectives in the room and having deliberate conversations around what seems to be best for the audience that you're designing for, and if that audience grows, what are the implications and what can we do to make it as maybe as adaptable as possible? I really admire some of the adaptive protocols that have come in around suggested emoji use, where you'll have your recently used emoji or frequently used emoji, which are two different things, but often share the same space. In my talk, I sung slacks praises, and I will sing them here as well, where you can create your own category. There's a whole custom category of emoji that you can put in. So I think the balance of making research-based decisions around what the default is and then allowing for a certain amount of customization and flexibility within that, I think in there somewhere in there is the sweet spot.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's an important point, and this has been a deeply personal and thoughtful conversation. You've certainly given me plenty of things to go away now to the boxing gym and think about while I'm trying to get a workout and I Sure there's
- Q Walker:
- A box about emoji.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've used that a few times and I'm sure you've given people who are listening or watching this plenty to think about as well. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Q Walker:
- Thank you for providing an opportunity. The questions that you ask have in preparation and during this session have really helped me to articulate some of my stance and my role in this. So I really appreciate your hosting style, Brendan. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My pleasure. My pleasure. Q and Q, for people who want to follow or keep up to date with what you are doing, what you're contributing, the things that you've been putting out there and saying, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Q Walker:
- With the caveat that I mentioned earlier that I'm quite elusive online, I would say for the dedicated person that wants to contact me, I do welcome connection. I really welcome warm connection. LinkedIn is the best way to do that. You can find me at Q Walker. I think my URL extension is Q Walker NZ or something like that. I'm not too hard to find on LinkedIn. Just please know I'm very limited in my screen time by design, and so if I don't get back to you right away, that's just how I am. So yeah, if someone really wants to make that contact, I welcome that and know. Otherwise, I'm pretty quiet. I'm pretty quiet on social media.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, good. Thank you Q and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Q on LinkedIn and all of the things that we've spoken about will be chaptered specifically on the YouTube video.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are really helpful. Subscribe so it pops up every two weeks. And also tell just maybe one other person about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Just search for Brendan Jarvis. Or you can find a linked profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- And until next time, keep being brave.