The worldviews we build with: Why good design starts in the spirit

This event will be online on YouTube and in-person (New York City). The speaker and live stream starts at 7:30 pm ET. In-person attendees may arrive as early as 7 pm ET. If arriving late, please leave a comment on this page and someone will come down ASAP.

Description
Every product we ship carries a worldview. "Efficiency is paramount." "Scale is the goal." "User engagement is the gateway.” Most of us don’t pause to reflect on what foundations we're building within ourselves. Stuff that feels too nebulous and exists out there, instead of in us, in here.

This isn't a talk about "bad actors." It's about the rest of us. The well-intentioned designers, PMs, and engineers whose unexamined defaults quietly shape what gets built, who it serves, and who it harms.

Drawing on indigenous learnings from Aotearoa New Zealand, and examples from accessibility and AI design, we'll explore what happens when we treat worldview work as foundational rather than optional.

Elina Ashimbayeva is determined to find hope amid humanity's existential crisis! Join Elina! This session will focus on examples and allow people to interact with each other to reflect on our individual and team practices and worldviews.
Because you can't change a practice without first changing the soil it grows in.

Attendees will leave with ...

• A clearer view of the worldviews running underneath your own work
• Language to name them with your team
• Examples of how different worldviews produce radically different products - especially in AI and accessibility
• A small set of tools and prompts for doing worldview work as part of practice, not separate from it.

Presenter bio
Elina Ashimbayeva is a product manager, community builder, and facilitator with over a decade of work across healthcare, education, and social impact. Originally from Kazakhstan and Aotearoa New Zealand, she is now based in New York. Elina has led product and discovery work at Health New Zealand, designed the Equitable Product Cohort on ethics and equity in tech, and run a storytelling community, Storyo.

Her practice sits at the intersection of human-centred design, values-led leadership, and the harder, slower work of shifting the worldviews underneath how teams actually operate.
She recently launched Making Good Money, a podcast on financial transparency with founders of mission-driven ventures, where she talks about the values that we make decisions from, in life and in work.

Elina loves dancing, poetry and, notable mention, mayonnaise.

Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the Aira ASL App, and download it before the event.

For the Blind and Low Vision community, learn about the Aira Explorer App and download it before the event. To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect.

For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com two weeks before the event.

Livestream
YouTube link coming soon

Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.

Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access.

The building is near several transit stops:
6 train

• Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
• Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles

B/D/F/M

• Broadway-Lafayette St., 0.2 miles

NQRW trains

• Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
• Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles

M1 / M55 Bus lines

• Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet

Cabs and rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance

Important note
Google Maps currently incorrectly pins the location around the corner on Crosby Street. The entrance is not on Crosby. The entrance is on Spring Street, inside the Marc Jacobs International building. It is roughly halfway between Crosby and Lafayette, almost directly across Spring Street from the Chipotle restaurant.

Traveling to the event?
We recommend Hotel on Rivington or Crosby Street Hotel.

Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).

Sponsors
Thanks to Aira, AKQA, Deque, Evinced, Equal Entry, and Fable for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com