Unlearning my way to a Head of Research role
As I transition into my new role as Head of Research at Chayn, I’ve been reflecting on four major shifts in my research practice over the past few years.
The shifts are:
- The purpose of research – From profit seeking to movement building
- My ways of knowing – From ‘hot takes’ to slower, somatic sensing
- My mindset – From extractive to impact-driven
- My engagement with topics – From shallow dips to deeper dive
I’ve been professionally working now for 16 years and in that time I’ve explored a range of different research and design roles. I’ve been a brand strategist, a market researcher, a trends reporter, a multi-disciplinary design researcher, and a UX researcher. Now I’m practicing trauma-informed research.
For the past 7 years, I’ve primarily freelanced as a researcher in design agencies, tech firms and non profits, while honing a sensitive research practice. I’ve sought out projects on socially taboo issues (think menopause, or sexual dysfunction) and designed services for people who have experienced traumas such as incarceration, suicide bereavement, and opioid addiction. Since November 2021, I have also been leading User Research at Chayn, part time. Chayn is a global, feminist non-profit organisation providing resources and support for survivors of gender-based violence (GBV).
Sitting at home (since WFH became the norm), and working across the design, tech and non-profit sectors, often at the same time, I’ve felt my way around the norms and expectations of being a researcher in each. Chayn exists fairly uniquely as a blend of all three, being a non-profit that is both design-led AND tech-first. This vantage point has helped me to identify the mindsets and methods that tend to lead to good quality research outcomes wherever you are, and those which are inappropriate and even harmful if applied in the wrong context.
In lots of ways I’ve started from scratch over the last couple of years, and it’s been as much about unlearning as learning. As I move into a research leadership role at Chayn, I wanted to share four transformational shifts in the way I approach research that have helped me to get here.
1. A shift in the purpose of research: From crafting insight for commercial gain, to crafting insight to help build a movement
While working as a research lead in design and innovation consulting for five-plus years (mainly at IDEO but at other firms too), private sector clients were often focused on having us define ‘the future of’ their industry. Projects required us to explore and prototype what say, travelling for business, driving a car, shopping for home furnishings or cooking for your family might look like in 10 years’ time. Then, as a design team, we would go on to define the role that our client could ‘uniquely’ play in that imagined future.
The research insights gleaned from this kind of design exploration were a big part of the intellectual property that clients paid us for, and ultimately owned. Insights were to be protected and kept a secret, lest any other organisation benefit from them — and have an equally ‘big idea’. Insights were expensive to craft, treated as a competitive asset, and they were bought and sold as such.
Now that I work for a non-profit (Chayn), it’s been inspiring for me to see that insights are generated and shared not for commercial advantage but to advance a community towards their mission. For us, that means the community of people working to end gender-based violence.
Chayn shares insights generously and openly because our sector doesn’t have the funding to justify having many organisations all doing duplicate work, let alone doing it in secret. We also share insights because our feminist mission is to build a movement to end gender-based violence, something that can’t be achieved by one organisation alone. The move from generating insights for competitive advantage to sharing them generously for movement building was a major mindset shift for me.
That said, early on in my role at Chayn it was quite uncomfortable for me to learn that I would be expected to share my work publicly as part of this culture. Sharing forced me to explore some less-than-welcome feelings about being ‘seen’ and having my work be viewed as imperfect. It helped me to see how an organisation that expects you to share publicly, will also need to have a supportive culture rather than a judgmental one.
For me, sharing work openly has shifted from being something to fear (and which was not expected of me anyway) to being a contribution that I seek to make.
2. A shift in my ways of knowing: from ‘hot takes’ to slower, somatic sensing
In my work for agencies and corporate companies, particularly in tech start-and-scale ups, colleagues have made it plain that my key value lies in my ability to turn around strong research insights, fast.
In tech orgs in particular, it feels there’s an obsession with conducting research at speed — because, why would you do anything slowly? This means that my immediate ‘hot take’ on an interview or issue is all that I’ll have a chance to prepare for a team, and usually this is seen as good enough to begin designing with. It’s easy to start taking pleasure in delivering ‘good enough’ insight at high pace and I have felt strongly incentivised to do so — it’s directly connected to company growth goals.
In design and strategy firms around 10 years ago, I noticed that the already relentless pace of consulting projects took on a new dimension when, inspired by tech giants such as Google, we also started to run projects as ‘sprints’. These were projects lasting just one week, which took many shortcuts to developing problem-solving ideas. This pattern of working meant squeezing an entire research window into one day, and made a researcher’s ability to produce a ‘hot take’ on an issue even more valuable. But no one (me included) seemed to be asking the question‘who is suffering when researchers and designers are cutting corners?’.
‘Hot takes’ encourage bias and stereotyping, leading to things like badly conceived user needs and uninspiring personas. When your culture prioritises speed, it also deprioritises the critical development and interrogation of your learnings.
Hot takes in design and tech are about using the brain — and only the brain — to take in what a user has said, think fast about the human ‘why’ behind it, and define the insight through smart, snappy words. Whatever that insight is, it has to fit onto a post-it in order not to lose your team’s attention. Reflecting now, it is all so cerebral. It is also highly individualistic, albeit under the guise of collaborative working.
One thing that I learned very early on at Chayn was that if I interviewed survivors of sexual violence and came back to my team with a round of speedily formed insights (aka my ‘hot takes’), I would feel a prickle of unease in the (virtual) room.
Rather than delighting in my speed, colleagues would rightly question how I’d got to those conclusions and whether they were trustworthy or biased. It just seemed too fast, and too much about my take on the issue, rather than a reflection of the issue that the community might see themselves in. The key difference here is that in design agencies and tech companies, I’ve noticed that stakeholders are rarely the communities being designed for — whereas in Chayn, we are — so my colleagues feel rightly entitled to challenge research learnings as they’re being formed.
Something that KA McKercher talks excellently about in their book ‘Beyond Sticky Notes’ is that in design consulting, we can value ‘professionalism’ too highly, and tend to prefer the way brains compute over the way bodies sense and know. Often, the culture of designing at speed and the tools used to communicate ideas quickly — e.g., sticky notes — are also incredibly excluding. KA says:
“Relying heavily on sticky notes privileges those who can think quickly, are highly literate and literary and are well versed in thinking in headlines. Anyone who can’t do that is generally excluded and left bewildered by the pace of commercial design methods.”
In those uneasy virtual rooms at Chayn, I was warmly encouraged to slow down, and explore quite confronting ideas. Why did I feel the need to work so fast? Was the insight I’d put forward a bit of a leap from what the quotes said? Did it feel too ‘Global North’? (In truth, I’d never belonged to a team diverse enough for anyone to entertain this global north question, let alone ask it). In my experience outside of Chayn, there has also been little focus until recently on considering the neurodiversity of team members or service users, and different ways of learning.
Now, I’m much less likely to associate speed with feeling good about my work. In research interviews, I will make a point of sensing how the energy feels, and this helps me to stay more in tune with survivors. Doing this, I feel more able to say things like “I can sense a dip of energy, is there something that’s not sitting right here? Would you like to take a break or change topics?”. I think that this leads to better quality research outcomes. If I’m developing research insights and they don’t feel right to me, in my brain or my body, I am more confident to slow down, review and identify where I might be making a jump. The risk of implementing a hastily conceived insight into our design work is too big.
I have never had more conversations about pace than I have at Chayn. As colleagues, we know that if our bodies feel reactive or on high alert all the time, and if we are rushing our work, then that means work isn’t working for us. Somatic practices are important to us; at the start of every company-wide meeting we do a breathing exercise or stretch all together. This not only helps to calm our nervous systems as we navigate traumatic content, but it sends a clear message to us individually that it’s part of our work to be focusing on our bodies and honouring what they know. Normalising somatic sensing (alongside cerebral learning) is something I’ll be more confident to do, and try to promote when working with others as I step up.
3. A shift in my mindset: from extractive to impact-driven practice
Ever been asked to ‘mine’ a resource or group of people for insight? Me too.
The hustle and grind culture in the consulting, tech and agency worlds creates an attitude to research (and research participants) that could be summed up as: Get in, get your insight, get out, next up.
That’s a pretty extractive mindset, and is problematic when you’re working with communities who have already had their resources heavily and historically extracted. And it’s not just material, but spiritual and non-tangible resources such as attention, energy, time, ideas that are further taken from people when they engage with innovation projects.
Community-led design, relational design and co-design practices are mindful of this, and make extra effort not to see people’s time, expertise and ideas as free for the taking, or even commodities to buy. These practices are more focused on defining what kind of positive impact a collaboration could realistically result in, before fairly assessing what kinds of skills, support and ideas can be shared. Designers spend serious time considering what (if anything) it is essential to ask people for support with — especially those who are already underserved and/or traumatised.
Working for an organisation that seeks to drive impact rather than revenue, my user research mindset has moved from: ‘What knowledge can I gather from people in order to build profit?’ to ‘What can we learn with people to support them in their healing journey?’
Measuring success is much harder in an organisation like Chayn. In for-profit companies, success usually boils down to growth. In a feminist tech org like Chayn, measuring success means understanding healing — something that ebbs and flows, has set-backs and growth spurts. It is wholly un-linear, and so it resists boiling down. As our founder Hera Hussain noted when she wrote about our approach in 2021: “Where there is trauma, there is room for healing — but the route to heal will look different for everyone.”
At Chayn, the way we create insights from raw research material also challenges the mindset of extraction. In design and tech firms that I’ve worked in, the insight itself is designed to be reductive. Learnings are crunched down to their smallest possible form whilst holding the most meaning per ‘bite’. Fewer insights are better for stakeholders with short attention spans, while user stories are selected, chopped into slides and used to make a case for the right business decision.
At Chayn we resist the idea of crunching down research stories about people until they fit into neat patterns. I care deeply about clear and directional research insights, but I am now more careful not to flatten survivor stories to try and make them fit so tightly into insight themes. We’re more pluralistic in our search for insight.
Just last week, we learned that survivors have concepts of ‘expertise’ that are very pluralistic. They understand ‘an expert’ to mean many things — even things that are contradictory. To some survivors, an expert means someone who has lived experience of abuse, to others it is someone who has professional therapist qualifications. To some it’s simply someone who identifies as a woman, while for others it’s a person who campaigns on the issue of GBV. This kind of learning gives rise to particularly hard design challenges; how do we clearly communicate our expertise, when it means so many things to survivors? Instead of forcing the analysis, we will make space as a team to discuss that reality and find a way forward.
4. A shift in my focus: From shallow dips to deeper dive engagement in topics
This is where I’ve probably done the most unlearning.
When I first started supporting clients with highly sensitive research projects, I felt that I could just hop in and out of projects and do a good job. Often times I was supporting charity organisations pro-bono, in order to deepen my exposure to more challenging research topics — so there was a financial incentive to treating these projects as shallow dives; I needed to dip into other, higher paid work to support myself at the same time, often with tech orgs.
Design Thinking implies you do not need to be an expert in anything except following the Design Thinking methodology in order to do great work. So in my mind, I was just bringing this mentality to lots more meaningful projects.
But Chayn has helped me to see that you cannot do a ‘good job’ of challenging gender-based violence by seeing it as another topic to roll up your sleeves and apply Design Thinking to. And as I’ve come to learn, the Design Thinking methodology does not lend itself particularly well to trauma-informed design work.
Sarah Fathallah and Anne-Laure Fayard co-wrote a must-read piece on the limits of (and harm done by) applying Design Thinking to complex social issues. In it they talk about how Design Thinking tends to oversimplify issues and produce solutions that are decontextualised — which lessens their chance of having positive, lasting impact. They say:
“We reject design thinking as a singular tool kit prescribed to solve social problems. [In what follows] we explain why design thinking as typically practiced has not been able to create impactful and sustainable solutions to complex social issues. Instead, we call for a critical stance on design, where critical means both discerning and important.”
One reason for the mis-match between Design Thinking and trauma-informed design lies in the beginners mindset. This is lauded for leading to the type of new and excellent creative ideas that only Design Thinking can produce.
Design Thinking posits that bringing fresh eyes to a challenge (aka bringing on a smart, eager design team with no prior knowledge of the issue) generates a different perspective that’s long been missing. But this process can be harmful when you consider its application in trauma-informed research. I might go into research about hospitality or shopping centre design as a total beginner, but how safe or even useful is it going to be for me (or my participants) to go into research about rape or domestic violence as a total beginner? When you’re cycling through different projects at speed, you lack the depth of engagement, the critical context and the trauma-informed methods that will help you avoid doing harm. Especially if your company mantra is anything like ‘move fast and break things’.
Until recently, I’ve spent 1.5 days a week in my role at Chayn and honestly, the amount of reading and learning that I’ve done around the edges probably matches that time. I‘ve wanted to explore and understand how trauma (broadly), public health, social justice, race, gender, the history of colonialism (particularly in design), digital developments such as AI, and violence against marginalized genders — all intersect. This is just to get my head around the systemic nature of gender- based violence, and the many oppressive structures at play that reinforce it — not to mention enable it online.
That said, the discomfort of really engaging with the topic of structural violence has, at times, felt too much. I have often felt overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the violence that people are experiencing. It has felt tempting to just move onto the next project as I have been taught so well to do. I’ve also learned that this temptation to look away is part of the work to overcome. Now that I‘m more knowledgeable and committed to learning, I’m more at home within the discomfort of this sector, and less likely to want to move onto the next shiny thing as a beginner. Frankly I’ve also learned too much to throw it away.
Rachael Dietkus, founder of Social Workers who Design, encourages us to centre a trauma-informed and responsive framework of practice as its own entity, rather than trying to recast Design Thinking with a trauma-informed lens. What I’m learning more and more is that even though it was a pre-cursor for my career personally, Design Thinking is not the logical pre-cursor to Trauma-Informed design. The latter is not just a more sensitive approach to the former, with knottier topics to tackle, and more meaningful impact. Rachael has helped me to learn that trauma-informed and responsive design has a long history, and roots in trauma-informed clinical practice, social justice and the feminist politics of care. This is a very different set of perspectives and histories than that of commercial design as an industry.
What I believe we’re doing in our trauma-informed design work at Chayn is drawing on the best aspects of A) design as a discipline (vs an industry), and B) technology’s affordances, to build a mission-driven organisation that has a strong social impact.
From a design perspective these ‘best bits’ include a culture of curiosity and openness, prioritising creative ideas and problem solving, handling ambiguity with confidence, multi-disciplinary working, continual experimentation and delivering beautifully crafted services. From a feminist technology perspective, this means building services with the values of free access, global reach, community building, open source sharing, user agency and organisational responsiveness at their core.
If you’d like to read more about how we practice trauma-informed research and design at Chayn, check out our 2023 Whitepaper, and a series of posts on our methods that I wrote last year. If you’d like to know more about our critique on extractive research practices, and how to build survivor centred interventions to tech abuse, read Orbits.
Get in touch (jenny@chayn.co) if you would like to talk to us about trauma-informed research projects, knowledge sharing, partnerships or movement building activities.
