Unlock empathy with structured content

All too often, content becomes an afterthought in design work. We end up duplicating it, use it to fill in empty boxes, not adapting it to all its audiences, getting it stuck, and we let it keep people out of our services.

How can rethinking our approach to content make our work/design/products more empathetic, sustainable, and available? In this talk, we will show how structured content unlocks empathy and offer some practical ways to work with content as data.

Key takeaways from this talk:
1. Gain insights into a new approach to content work
2. Make connection between structured content and accessibility
3. Learn what it means to have sustainable content

About our speakers

Lauren Etheridge is a Developer Relations Specialist at Sanity.io. She focuses on strategic diversity, inclusion, and equality (DEI) efforts within the Sanity community. Previously, she was a lead web developer/programmer analyst at North Carolina State University. Before transitioning into web development and digital communications in academia, Lauren was a social worker and community educator in the field of harm reduction. She is a huge fan of David Lynch and plays the theremin! Lauren is passionate about digital ethics and community building, transformative justice, collaborative learning, and building things with the Raspberry Pi motherboard and making experimental music.

Carrie Hane is a creative problem solver and connector of people, processes, and technology. For more than 20 years, she’s been helping organizations transform to meet the ever-changing needs of the people they serve and take advantage of the latest technology. She is the co-author of Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow (New Riders, 2018), a framework for a pioneering approach to sustainable digital publishing. As a consultant and web team lead, she has worked with numerous clients to create content models, design content around the model, and develop repeatable processes for ongoing efficiency and effectiveness. In her current role as Head of Content Strategy Relations for the content platform Sanity.io, she advocates for designing connected content as a means to develop sustainable content.