How might we challenge a very popular design method?
Role: design researcher and strategist
Skills: critical thinking, systems thinking, diagram development
Tools: Adobe InDesign
Team: individual project
Swimming against the current
Context
Various corporations and organizations, acknowledging the impact of design thinking to address complex issues, have pushed the discipline of Design to professionalize continually. Designers devised methods and tools to ground their thinking and doing processes. While considered useful by many practitioners, some of them have remained unquestioned for decades.
Challenge
After weeks of studying the emergence and prevalence of politics in designed objects and experiences, and how such might unintentionally perpetuate oppressive power dynamics into the future, we were tasked to imagine how we could make a design method anti-oppressive. References needed to be drawn from Vijay Kumar’s 101 Design Methods book.
Actions
The assignment was individual and meant to be completed in a week. I submerged into the content and conducted rapid assessments of the politics embedded in salient design methods. Picking a method was not an easy undertaking. I decided to reimagine user journey maps, popular in service design.
I dissected the method. I thought about the name, the step-by-step process, the promised outcome of its use. I leveraged secondary research on indigenous knowledge and narratives, linguistics and ebonics, and cognitively impaired individuals. I diagrammed the different modes of human experience, cross-checked the traditional method and identified missing elements. I reflected upon the intention behind the method and my own context and narrative as part of the non-dominant population in the US. I incorporated feedback from people with diverse worldviews.
The reimagined method is for brave designers. The prompts to the end beneficiaries are not subjugated to the specific space of intervention a company has already imagined. They should start with the person’s pains and, if the company can’t address them, it should leverage their capabilities and resources to offset them. It’s an impact'-first not profit-first method.
Results
The outcome was a more comprehensive design method with a different starting point: the person. The designer who uses it will acknowledge the person’s pains in life - not in the delivery of a service. By pinpointing how they relate to each other and to deeper power dynamics, you can draw a path to actually put the end beneficiary in a better position.
The flipped method is largely informed by theory of collaborative design and social systems intervention. The designer is not abstracted from the problem but deeply entrenched in it via his/her understanding of the person. If the company or organization that is managing the project doesn’t have the proper capabilities to ease those real-life pains, it should work closely with those who do to create desired, meaningful impact in non-dominant groups.
Learnings
I acquired critical skills in a different space than I normally do: rapid assessment and prototyping of ideas and cross-referencing research with my personal context (ingraining myself in the process). Furthermore, I conducted a meta-cognitive reflection - a novel, interesting exercise which enabled me to document personal insights from the process.