Designing for Inclusion: Prioritizing practices that lead to equity and liberation
Written by Liv Jenks with interviewing help from Kim Heng.
For our annual conference, Stanford Womxn in Design chose to focus on designing for inclusion — how we can re-think, challenge, and extend traditional design thinking practices to address systemic race, gender, and disability discrimination.
With people tuning in from across the country, keynote speaker and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab Antionette Carroll began the conference by sharing a video where she describes how her lived experiences “are her superpower” that motivate her to design for justice and change.
Carroll emphasized how systems of oppression are by design — and “have been by design for a long time” — which also means they can be re-designed. To approach this re-designing work, Carroll focuses on amplifying the lived experiences of underinvested communities: “Don’t design in ivory towers. You have to immerse yourself in those communities, appreciating lived expertise as much as professional expertise.”
Next, Jen White-Johnson, a disabled designer, activist, and assistant professor of Visual Communications Design and Art at Bowie State University, led us through an interactive design workshop. Using “New Latin Wave 2021,” a collaboratively designed typeface, White-Johnson invited us to craft messages defining what social justice and equity means to us.
We concluded day one with an amazing panel of speakers, featuring Tania Anaissie, founder and CEO of Beytna Design, Emi Kolawole a Firestarter at X, and Mary Bellard, the Principal Innovation Architect Lead at Microsoft. Moderated by Diane Dwyer, a professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, the panelists discussed how they prioritize inclusive design in their individual roles and professional work spaces.
Anaissie recalled a moment when she, “realized that a lot of design thinking has remnants of white supremacy and systems of oppression, which makes sense because the legacy of design is in corporate, which is profit driven.” She went on to describe how she uses a framework and process called “co-designing,” which invites people who actually “live the challenge” to join the design process and bring their lived expertise. Bellard echoed the value of co-design, saying that, “Within the disability community, co-design plays a huge role in whether our products are actually helpful and useful. When you begin to think of the problem as the environment, not the person, you start to unlock the number of people who could use a product. You want to invest in working collaboratively with disabled people, rather than designing products for the disabled community.”
To kick off day two, Andrea Small, a strategist and educator at Samsung Research America, moderated a panel with Aubrie Lee, Beth Williamson, and Elizabeth Guffrey on the intersection between disability and design.
Lee — a Stanford Product Design alum and current “professional namer” at Google — spoke about how she combines her love of language and her lived experience with disabilities to address design challenges. “Disabled and disability are not perfect terms. When someone doesn’t want to say disability or say disabled, usually it’s a sign of them not being comfortable with the content, not just the word.” She cited the example of how disabled people — even at Stanford — often have to request accommodations, “which places the burden on them. Instead, how can we lift that burden and create systems for the disabled?”
Guffrey, Professor of Art and Design History, Head of MA Program at Purchase College, built on Lee’s call for environments that normalize and accommodate disabilities, adding that a key part of this shift is about teaching people. “It’s really an opportunity as a designer to get the word out and to make it very clear to people that the priority should be thinking through these accessibility problems. In the disabled community, it seems clear to us, but there are so many people who have so much to learn,” Guffrey said.
To conclude the panel, Williamson, an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, encouraged the audience to reflect on the design of their own communities and spaces, prompting Stanford students to consider “How is Stanford doing in terms of disabled students being able to become design school graduates? Take for example the archetype design studio, and the expectation that everyone stays up all night in these studio spaces that are big and open and really loud and have high tables. From physical to sensory to modes of speaking and interpersonal respect, there are a lot of issues there.”
The panelists’ perspectives underscored that designers from all backgrounds have a responsibility to prioritize accessible design, investigating what it can look like to approach re-designing systems and spaces for disabled communities.
To share some of the future-facing design work that’s at the forefront of addressing disability challenges, Alexa Siu, a PhD student at Stanford, came to speak about her work at the SHAPE Lab, which focuses on leveraging human-centered computing to make digital interactions more tangible and physical. In her presentation, Siu focused on shapeCAD, an Accessible 3D design and printing system for the blind and visually-impaired, describing how to is a workflow tool “that supports blind users’ spatial abilities, which is crucial in education and STEM learning.”
Closing the conference, Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, reminded the audience to move forward with patience and persistence, calling on participants and attendees to “design movements, not moments.” Encouraging students to consider how they can use design to do good, Zheng said, “We need to ensure that our work is contextualized within something bigger. And when we act as we should and as we must, we need to make sure that what we are doing is helping and contributing to the solution.”
Additional Info
Learn more about the conference speakers here.
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