Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Evolving the design thinking framework towards greater equity: an interview with Tania Anaissie of Beytna Design

beytna design

The murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery (and countless others before them) brought thousands together to catalyze another modern reckoning with systems of White Supremacy, state-sanctioned violence, and exploitative capitalism. These changes created what Mario Lugay calls political openings — opportunities to catalyze change and collectively move to a higher level of consciousness. Liberatory Design is an evolution of the design thinking methodology. It’s an approach to problem solving that helps people translate their equity values into action. Mario is Justice Funders’ Senior Director of Innovation where he partners with philanthropy and field practitioners to design, pilot and scale collective action that advances social movements. He is the founder of the movement-building technology platform, Giving Side, and is a long time, philanthropic and nonprofit consultant, speaker and trainer.

“Beytna Design is the byproduct of my personal mission to design for equity.

Designing for Good with Design for America - Design Milk

Designing for Good with Design for America.

Posted: Tue, 08 Sep 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]

I became obsessed with the question of how to leverage design for liberation. First, I needed to break down how I thought design was perpetuating injustice so that I could pinpoint where to start redesigning Design Thinking. Design Thinking can overly focus on narrow programs, experiences, and products without looking to the complex and/or randomly chaotic systems they operate in. What if instead we looked beyond symptoms and asked ourselves if we can launch a portfolio of experiments across the system and look at both long-term and short-term emergency support?

Tania Anaissie

Sue’s innate love for the outdoors became even stronger, when she sailed around the world at 20, with family and friends in a sailboat they purchased and renovated themselves. For more than four decades, Sue Firestone has cultivated her personal passion for design, operating two leading, international interior design firms and assembling a portfolio that includes the world’s most luxurious homes and premier five-star resorts and hotels. Liberatory Design also includes a deeper examination of the history of how systems were designed, the equity implications, the origins of a problem, and the systemic ripple effects. A group of students doing a design project abroad, in Tanzania, was interviewing employees at a clinic. The supervisor of the clinic was upset to see them in the room and said, “I’m sick of young White researchers coming in and taking the time of clinicians and we never see anything come of it.” One student responded defensively and argued with the supervisor.

We work with mission-driven partners looking to take action towards their equity endeavors.

Join us for this 3-part workshop series co-sponsored by The UC Berkeley Anti-Racist Campus Initiative, The Graduate Division, People & Culture, Equity & Inclusion and the Office for Faculty Equity & Welfare. Select units with attendees at all 3 workshops will be invited to team coaching to implement a liberatory design project within their unit. My invitation is to consider, “How much are we willing to share power with the community we want to design with, and how might we invite them to collaborate? ” In my opinion, the more they are involved, the higher the chance you will create truly transformative and equitable ideas. Liberatory Design is a way of being and working that facilitates change towards equity. It’s an innovation practice rooted in sharing power, recognizing oppression, and centering those most impacted by inequity.

It is important to Sue to create a comfortable and meaningful environment that elevates someone’s personal style without overtaking it. The best way to engage a community is to authentically involve them, while remembering that no one owes us their trust or time, and the best we can do is design an invitation with respect and humility, and be willing to listen to their feedback. I basically reached a point where I was having a “crisis” about how design was practiced, and I felt a strong pull to re-examine the whole thing to imagine it as a force for equity. Without deep self and systems-awareness, we often reproduce the same systems of oppression regardless of our intent. With the Stanford Life Design Lab, we co-created a curriculum review framework to filter existing content through an intersectional equity lens and to guide the creation of new equity-grounded content in the future.

beytna design

Outcomes

We facilitated groups of over 100 youth in each city to lead their own Liberatory Design projects over 6 months. We cannot dismantle a system unless we understand how it was designed (intentionally and unintentionally). When designing in the U.S., that means understanding how the status quo came to be — one that devalues our human, plant, and animal siblings in order to keep power in the hands of a handful of elites.

Tools

It creates default “truths” and views any challenge to them as “making things political.” It creates an illusion of objectivity through the idea of rationality. The values that prop it up are the dehumanization of Blackness and Indigeneity, the control of those living in poverty, and the erasure of cultures and traditions. By designing for the status quo either actively or passively, we are reproducing injustice. We designed and led an intensive training during which their leadership team redesigned professional development for their staff with an equity lens. We have led two co-design workshops with their National Youth Advisory Board members who have lived experience with legal representation in the child welfare system. In these sessions, we learned from their lived experience in group interviews and together, synthesized and prioritized learnings to apply to the project.

Ask the Community

While much of the backlash can be chalked up to the classic distaste of change, there were also usability complaints, such as the fact that scrolling the comments required scrolling the entire page down, removing the video from view. The look and feel of YouTube.com has seen its fair share of tweaks over the years, but it’s largely felt the same for a long time. The video player takes over the bulk of the screen with its title and description directly below, and recommendations off to the side.

NYT ‘Strands’ Hints, Spangram And Answers For Thursday, April 25

I hope it can be received in the spirit of love in which I am writing it. But early in my studies, I had questions about the ethics of our practice. The framing that designers were more insightful, more creative, and more capable of solving problems communities faced was in deep tension with the wisdom, creativity, and organizing power I saw in communities I came from.

The training supported their legal empowerment cohort working across the globe to support oppressed communities. Projects covered transgender health access, opioid addiction support, re-entry services and more. The youth developed relationships with neighbors and local experts, collected community feedback on ideas, and launched their ideas by the end of the program. Several leaders are still connected to us through ongoing mentorship and have transferred their design skills to their professional and personal lives. With fresh, interested eyes Sue absorbed a myriad of cultures that left her with a deep appreciation of the unique and profound impact of art and design. At the same time, seeing places almost completely untouched by humanity left Sue with a passion for what we would today call green living and an eagerness to incorporate her experiences into her personal taste in design.

We will be workshopping with brand new tools and sharing our perspectives & ideas in community. Informed by this progress, we created an equity strategy for leadership and facilitated custom White Supremacy Culture workshops. When designing for liberation, it is important to both think and do differently. Mindsets help articulate our equity values and assess if we are manifesting them in our work. Rachael Dietkus is a mom, social worker, design researcher, organizational strategist, and founder of Social Workers Who Design.

Decolonizing Design, Explained - Built In

Decolonizing Design, Explained.

Posted: Wed, 18 May 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Earlier this month, YouTube started testing out a new redesign for its desktop website which was met with overwhelming backlash from those who saw it. I didn't use any hints and the spangram was the fifth theme word I found. CROWN in the center and HELMET in the top right exposed the spangram, which snaked around the words I'd found to that point.

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