Building a decolonized practice with the people we design with - Part 3/3

This is a three-part series focused on building a decolonized practice with the people we design with.

In Part 1, we reflected on the tensions, learnings and experiments we’re working through as part of our decolonizing work to shift power with generosity.

In Part 2, we looked at ways to overcome paternalism and othering while centering living and lived expertise.

This week in Part 3, we’ll explore ways to overcome other elements of white supremacy culture.

This series does not attempt to be exhaustive. Rather, it reflects where we are in our decolonization journey.

Tension: White supremacy culture valorizes newness and quick results which is at odds with building on what’s already working well, investing in relationships and moving thoughtfully and with intention

Indicators

“Disruption” has been co-opted by the language of white supremacy culture, made popular by slogans like “move fast, break things” and “ask forgiveness, not permission”.

Methods like Design Sprints promise to solve big problems in a handful of days while ignoring the potential for collateral damage and unintended consequences that are inevitable when moving at break-neck speed.
On a macro level, we live in a world where white supremacy culture values convenience. This translates into an expectation that there are shortcuts to solving big problems when in reality, meaningful change takes time.
What if “disruption” meant moving thoughtfully and with intention?

On a micro-level, this might look like holding fast to untenable deadlines, deliverables and timelines with no room for emergence.

It happens when work becomes transactional instead of relational.
It happens every time our clients ask more of us, or when we ask more of the people we work, when value is reduced to “geting our money’s worth”. Relationships become a means to an end.

Questions we’re noodling on

How might we create more containers for rest and care - resisting white supremacy norms and urgency culture?
How might we invest in relationships that last beyond the timelines of our projects?

Experiments we're trying

Making “disruption” mean moving thoughtfully and with intention. While the possibilities of imagining “innovative solutions” and “radical new approaches” to systemic challenges sounds alluring…For some of us, the first experiment might involve channeling that big ideation energy into asking:

What’s already been tried and what can we learn?
How do we define innovation - Are we inadvertently equating innovation with newness?
What’s already working well and what can we build on?

Seeing our work as marathons instead of sprints. What started as a tongue in cheek way to resist the lure of the ‘Design Sprint’, turned into the idea of a ‘Design Marathon’. Unlike Sprints which are encoded with Eurocentric biases and white supremacy culture, the rationale behind a Marathon is that meaningful change takes time, practice, community support and continuous learning. Marathons create space for equity and relationships to flourish, while moving at a pace that is thoughtful, intentional and responsive to emergence.

Expanding upon the sprint model, marathons are inspired by and integrate principles and methods from design justice, co-design, decoloniality, systems thinking, biomimicry, pluriversal design, indigenous knowledge, trauma-responsive and trauma-informed design approaches, among many many others.
At its core, Marathons are designed to intentionally shift power and design with the people closest to and most impacted by a challenge or problem. This also involves thinking about challenges holistically and intersectionally, building on what’s already strong, prioritizing people and relationships over transactions and holding space for different ways of knowing, being and doing.
We’ve kept the best of sprints, with some tweaks: assembling and collaborating as interdisciplinary teams WHILE prioritizing relationships, care and rest; continuous iteration, testing and learning WHILE actively seeking and building on what’s already working well; and keeping things time bound WHILE letting context and the scope of the challenge determining the time-frame, with room for emergence.
This is all very work-in-progress. If you’d like to chat more, please reach out!

Shifting our mindsets by seeing relationships as a continuum, instead of a means to an end. This involves thinking about:

Are relationships with the people we work with likely to shift and evolve over time?
What do these relationships need to be nurtured and supported, allowing them to continue when our role ends?
What does composting and transformation look like in the context of these relationships?
What should after care look like, once our role ends?

Making space for emergence involves investing ACTUAL resources (time, money, people etc.) into building and nurturing relationships with the people we work with. Many of us use project kick-off meetings and charters to agree on deadlines, deliverables and timelines and other specifics at the outset. However, we rarely revisit these as a project progresses, often because of schedules and time. An experiment in emergence might look like intentionally creating time and space - let’s say 15 minutes a month - to check in with each other and ask:

What’s come up since?
What are we holding?
Where do we need support?
What’s on our minds?
How might some timelines, dependencies, deliverables and deadlines need to shift?

Reflection

My eternal gratitude to all the community members who shared the stories behind the tensions and experiments you see throughout this series. I hope I am doing you justice.

If any of this resonates with your own experiences (or not!) or brings up stories you’d like to share, I’m here to listen and hold space with you - Please reach out!

Building a decolonized practice with the people we design with - Part 2/3

This is a three-part series focused on building a decolonized practice with the people we design with.

Last week in Part 1, we reflected on the tensions, learnings and experiments we’re working through as part of our decolonizing work to shift power with generosity.

This week in Part 2, we’ll look at ways to overcome paternalism and othering while centering living and lived expertise.

Next week in Part 3, we’ll challenge other elements of white supremacy culture.

This series does not attempt to be exhaustive. Rather, it reflects where we are in our decolonization journey.

Tension: Paternalism and othering are deeply embedded in the tools and processes we use as designers

Indicators

One of many manifestations of white supremacy culture, paternalism looks like valuing learned expertise over living and lived experience as expertise.

Many community members shared stories of clients who were unwilling to offer compensation to research or co-design participants, hire people with living and lived expertise on design teams, or pay people with living and lived expertise at the same rate as learned expertise.
Across stories shared, paternalism showed up when the words or actions of someone in a position of power demonstrate they do not "trust” communities to be able to define their own needs or make decisions for themselves.
Othering showed up as exclusion (us vs. them mindset), marginalization (we are / know better), and unconscious bias in favor of the status quo (a preference for preserving systems of structural inequality and oppression).

Paternalism can also look like an over reliance on personas as a proxy for living and lived expertise.

While personas can help build empathy for the people and communities we design with, over-relying on them can be problematic as they reduce complex human behavior, experiences and decision-making to two dimensional monoliths.
Furthermore, they are imbued with the assumptions, unconscious biases and stereotypes of the people creating them (no matter how evidence-based) and people with living and lived expertise rarely have any control over the narrative, let alone the outcomes.

Are we perpetuating paternalism and othering by expecting 'users' to change behavior without addressing our own?

Designers wield immense power in influencing, shaping and changing behavior. By default, the leading agents of behavior change are presumed to be ‘the user’. Unique to the the social sector is a dynamic where ‘users’ (i.e. who benefits) aren’t always payers (i.e. who pays).
Power differentials aside, in the social sector, the role of designers are typically focused on changing behaviors and improving the lives of ‘users’ who represent individuals and communities that are underserved by mainstream systems. This understanding frames how we scope, define challenges, ideate, test and bring ideas to life. They impact people and the communities we claim to serve long after we’re gone and yet, we don’t always ask ourselves and our clients (i.e. who pays) how we might be part of the problem to begin with.

Questions we’re noodling on

As allies and advocates of people with living and lived expertise, how might we design it into the fabric of our work?
How might we do this meaningfully (i.e. avoiding tokenism, perpetuating harm) while ensuring fair value exchange (e.g. compensating people for time and expertise)?
How might we model the change we wish to see?

Experiments we're trying

Scoping living and lived expertise into our projects from the get-go:

Including compensation for people with living and lived expertise in our budgets and proposals.
Hiring people with living and lived expertise as part of our design teams and compensating them at the same rates as ourselves.
Consciously working to avoid extractive design practices that intentionally or unintentionally manifest as an entitlement to the stories, trauma, value or time shared by people with living and lived expertise.
Sharing decision making power with people with living and lived expertise.
Providing cash compensation to research and co-design participants with living and lived expertise.

Learning about the harms inherent in design and actively seeking ways to transform and decolonize our design and research practices towards approaches that are joyful, ethical, equitable and community led. For an example, see IDIA’s decolonized design research framework.

Being the change we want to see. What if every design engagement involved turning our tools and methods on ourselves and our clients, asking: How are we part of the problem? What behaviors, systems or structures do we need to dismantle, shift or change? How might we model the change we wish to see?

Reflection

What resonates with your experiences? What diverges from your experiences? What does this bring up for you?

Building a decolonized practice with the people we design with - Part 1/3

Design, as a methodology and tool for social change, has become mainstream. While this brings numerous benefits such as building empathy and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, it also carries significant drawbacks when done irresponsibly. These drawbacks include oversimplifying complex system dynamics, leading to unsustainable or unintended consequences, and, perhaps most significantly, exacerbating harm to communities underserved by current systems.

We’re terrific at designing for benefit, but terrible at designing against harm.

As a community of practice focused on decolonizing design, our work sits at the intersection of design, social impact and decolonization (see our definition of decolonization here). We devote considerable time to asking and answering some uncomfortable questions.

Think of it as a darker spin on design's favorite question: "How Might We?"

How might our work intentionally or unintentionally uphold systems of oppression?
How might we inadvertently cause harm?
How might we worsen existing situations?

We believe this critical self-reflection is necessary, particularly as the field evolves from designing ergonomic chairs to influencing justice systems.

We also believe that decolonization is only possible WITH the involvement of the people we design with—our clients, co-designers, communities, stakeholders, and participants. Design is deeply relational. Doing this work alone risks creating silos and echo chambers that replicate the same structures + systems of oppression we seek to dismantle. Hence, we also ponder:

How might we bring the people we work with along on our decolonization journey?

This series explores some of the tensions, learnings and experiments we’re working through as part of our decolonizing work.

This week in Part 1, we delve into the challenge of navigating power asymmetries with clients.

In Part 2, we’ll look at how paternalism and othering are embedded in the design processes, tools and methods we use.

In Part 3, we’ll challenge white supremacy culture.

This series does not attempt to be exhaustive. Rather, it reflects where we are in our decolonization journey.

Tension: It’s hard to hold healthy boundaries when power holds the purse strings

Indicators

Power asymmetries often hinder maintaining healthy boundaries.

Many community members recounted instances where they felt uncomfortable pushing back or refusing a client's demands, risking harm or the project's integrity.
Some took on work beyond their scope for fear of losing a significant client, while others faced challenges due to misaligned values.
A few shared stories of the courage it took to walk away, turn down work or even fire a client.

Moreover, shifting power is constrained by well-intentioned individuals oblivious to the power, positionality and privilege they hold within their organizations, communities and spheres of influence.

This might be the client or project lead (i.e. not necessarily the client entity) who lacks appropriate support or decision making power to act as an ally, advocate or thought partner.
It might also be the client or project lead who think of themselves as equal to their community partners, without understanding how power and positionality influence relationships and the work itself.

Questions WE’RE noodling on

How might we create a culture of safety where our teams and the people we design with feel safe, supported and cared for?
How might we shift power to the people we work with in a way that’s generous, kind and unconditional?

Experiments we're trying

Discussing power through small conversations, micro-moments and shared language to understand power asymmetries, align on values and set boundaries.

This might involve re-thinking how we co-develop a project “charter” or “brief”. Typically, a project charter is a tool to help design teams and clients align on things like scope, timelines, roles, responsibilities, decision making, ways of working, shared agreements etc. But why stop there?

A project charter can also be an opportunity to poke at the elephant(s) in the room - surface power asymmetries, talk about positionality and shifting power. (See here for positionality resources from community member Dr. Lesley Ann Noel)
Having an intentional project charter can make space for uncomfortable conversations with a client or project lead to ensure they are suitably equipped to be a thought partner, ally and advocate with appropriate decision making authority.
A project charter can also provide space for honest conversations around unconscious bias, unintended consequences and the importance of representation, living and lived experience.
Ultimately, it should be seen as a living document that can be iterated and updated along the way.

Practicing healthier boundaries.

Begin with baby steps - something you feel safe enough to test, and build from there. For example:

“I need processing time to reflect and digest information before making a decision. Can we revisit x tomorrow?”
“I am not available for calls before/ after x as this is quality time I spend with my family.”
“Instead of scheduling calls at times that are compatible with our work hours only, why don’t we do this async / alternate compatibility with the work hours of our community partners?”
“We firmly believe in compensating people with living and lived experience and expertise throughout the design process. This has been reflected in our proposed budget. We are happy to discuss this with you as we work together to refine project scope.”
“We need to pause to consider the unintended consequences and harms of this approach to x community. Should we continue to lead this work? Who should we partner with or who is better positioned to do so?”

Creating and using anonymous participation methods and feedback mechanisms to address power asymmetries in group dynamics.

To prevent outcomes that favor group members who hold more power, anonymous participation methods and feedback mechanisms can help level the playing field - keeping the focus on the integrity of ideas instead of the people behind them, as well as help teams and the people we design with voice dissent and disagree without fear of retaliation.
The caveat here is that these approaches are not proxies for the hard work involved in building psychological safety within a group.
As a community, we’re committed to doing this work to ensure our teams and the people we design with feel safe, supported and cared for, and this will look different for everyone.

Sticking to our scopes of practice as designers.

That being said, we also acknowledge there is privilege involved in being able to say no and turn down work.
Instead of NO, Could this be an opportunity to practice shifting power with generosity?
Can the work be re-scoped in whole or in part to better align with your scope of practice?
Can the work be parceled into smaller bits, creating space for mutual learning, learning from failure and growth?
Is there an opportunity to partner with others who know things we don’t?

Reflection

What resonates with your experiences? What diverges from your experiences? What does this bring up for you?

If you typically hold the role of client or project lead and occupy a position of power, what does this bring up for you? What experiments might you try?

Next week in Part 2, we’ll look at ways to overcome paternalism and othering while centering living and lived expertise.

In Part 3, the week after that, we’ll explore ways to overcome other elements of white supremacy culture.

Reimagining Community Agreements for Decolonizing Desi

Community agreements (also called group, shared, or mutual agreements) are used to guide how individuals engage with one another during gatherings. From one-off events to regular meetings, agreements are now commonplace.

Despite their prevalence, many designers and facilitators in the decolonizing design community observed that agreements often felt performative, rarely supported the needs of a group, and lacked mechanisms for collective accountability and care. While co-creation may help create collective accountability, it is not always guaranteed. Furthermore, agreements are particularly challenging to maintain with groups whose needs and size shift over time.

Leaning into the discomfort we felt around the effectiveness of our own community agreements, we put them up for scrutiny during our monthly decolonizing design labs. Drawing inspiration from Elise Granata's article, The Occasional Flimsiness of Group Agreements, we embarked on a journey to dissect and re-imagine our approach to agreements. We aimed to transform them into meaningful tools for community care that support our mission and purpose.

OUR AREA OF INQUIRY

We focused on three challenges which we defined as critical to our work decolonizing design: (i) The disconnect between agreements and a gathering’s design / purpose (ii) The relationship between psychological safety & collective accountability, and (iii) Unintended reinforcement of White Supremacy Culture.

The challenges and the experiments we identify are in no way comprehensive. We welcome reflections, practices and experiments from our wider community!

(i) The disconnect between agreements and a gathering’s design / purpose: Agreements felt ineffective, meaningless and performative when they were ‘recycled’ out of context and did not align with a gathering's design or purpose. Consider for example, an agreement for a team strategy retreat event that seeks to elevate “relationships over transactions” without providing space for connection in the agenda.

EXPERIMENTS TO TRY:

Embedding agreements into the design of a gathering: Effective agreements are integrated into the fabric of a gathering by design. Using the team strategy retreat example, the event facilitators might practice this agreement by providing a capacious agenda with plenty of structured connection activities balanced with content heavy strategy work, and intentionally making space for one-on-one meetings, individual reflection, processing and ‘digestion time’. This could also mean eschewing the norm of introducing people by their credentials and instead having people introduce themselves with personal stories as a way to find common ground.
Being intentional about when agreements are needed (and when they aren’t): Depending on the purpose of a gathering and the composition of a group, agreements may not be needed. Instead, consider an activity that helps each individual connect with the purpose of the gathering by asking them to reflect and share: What do you need from this space? What can you contribute to this space? What are you willing to commit to in service of this gathering’s purpose? This approach may be particularly relevant for one-off gatherings as a mechanism for creating individual (and possibly collective) accountability.

(ii) The relationship between agreements, psychological safety & collective accountability: When individuals or groups lack psychological safety, they are less likely to participate fully or be engaged. This might skew outcomes in favor of those members of a group who hold more power. In turn, this creates a vicious cycle that erodes relationship building, trust, inclusivity and engagement, especially among people who hold relatively less power as a result of their positionality within a system. Having an agreement like “take space, make space” is ineffective when the people who identify as introverts, neurodivergent, women, people of color or junior team members do not feel psychologically safe to challenge white male leadership who dominate the conversation during a staff meeting, for example.

EXPERIMENTS TO TRY:

Naming & shifting power as a way to build psychological safety and collective accountability: This might involve providing tools, language or learning opportunities to help a group notice power differentials, using this awareness to intentionally avoid replicating power imbalances and shift power, with facilitators modulating their involvement to empower the group accordingly: When there is psychological safety, the facilitator might explicitly share they are stepping back while inviting or reminding the group to collectively uphold its agreements. When group psychological safety needs are not met, it can be helpful and necessary for the facilitator to step in and hold individuals or the group accountable to its agreements.

(iii) Unintended reinforcement of White Supremacy Culture: Assuming that written agreements guarantee adherence can perpetuate harmful norms. Using vague and simplistic statements and punchy one-liners (For example, “one mic” or “be respectful”) without acknowledging multiple ways of knowing, being and expression.

EXPERIMENTS TO TRY

More intentional co-creation: Letting the group decide what actually needs to be written down. Inviting the group to come up with alternative ways to document agreements, while consciously practicing and honoring other ways of knowing, being and expression: oral, visual, storytelling, embodied learning, movement, art, silence, meditation, singing, dancing etc.
Real time reflection & positive feedback: Using live temperature checks (such as fist-to-five) to encourage real-time adherence and reflection on agreements. Noticing and appreciating when individuals or the group are practicing agreements in real time.
Looks like, feels like, sounds like: Ensuring that anything written down can be clearly understood - for instance providing descriptions of what each agreement looks, feels and sounds like in practice, while avoiding jargon, buzzwords, words that are vague or open to interpretation.

Our Evolved Community Agreements

Our community agreements (image below) have undergone significant transformation. This is a work-in-progress journey of continuous improvement, recognizing that meaningful change is a collective effort requiring kindness, adaptation and a growth mindset as the needs and and size of our community shift over time.

Many of the agreements represented here have been inspired by and adapted from words beautifully woven by Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Mathura Mahendren, the Design Justice Network, Pause and Effect, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and so many other fierce, brave and beautiful people whose wisdom, knowledge and lineage we have the honor and privilege of learning from and building on.

REFLECTION

As you reflect on your own experiences with community agreements, we’d love to hear:

What aspects of our journey resonate with you?
Where do you see room for improvement in your own practice?

Immense gratitude 🙏🏽 to our community for being willing to talk about the ‘iffy’ stuff and using our discomfort to (un)learn. Special appreciation to Julia and Rae for their co-facilitation, and to Lynn, Kurbally, Rachel, and Rebecca for their thoughtful contributions. Sending love and light to you all, always.