Interview with Steven Wakabayashi

Steven Wakabayashi is the founder of QTBIPOC Design — an organization that provides free and accessible design education, mentorship, and networking opportunities to LGBTQ+ designers of colour. After leading creative teams on some of the biggest brands including Apple, Salesforce, Sephora, Mercedes-Benz, and Samsung, he is now dedicating himself to bring more diversity and equity to creative teams around the world.

We catch up with Steven ahead of his Masterclass and Festival talk at UX Fest.

UX Fest: What did 2020 teach you about design leadership?

Steven: 2020 was a true test of design leadership in so many ways. With the sudden shift to a remote workforce due to the pandemic, teams had to quickly adapt to new ways of working. As a design leader, it was not only instituting various software for collaboration, but also finding balance for the team navigating the confusing balance both life and work and keeping morale high.

During the height of social and political movements, creating space for team members, especially Black, Indigenous, and people of color to heal, listen, and educate. Being a design leader during a tumultuous time was less about telling people what to do, but to help team members navigate through an unprecedented difficult period.

UX Fest: How has your approach to your role evolved over the years?

Steven: Over the years, social activism has become more and more integrated into my work. Most recently, I started a non-profit organization called QTBIPOC Design — an organization that provides free and accessible design education to LGBTQ+ designers of color. After many years of working and leading creative teams, saw the lack of diversity and wanted to make a change. By focusing on empowering and educating our LGBTQ+ BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities, my hope is to increase the talent pipeline with much more diverse talent, especially Black queer, Latinx queer, non-binary, and trans designers.

UX Fest: What are the greatest opportunities to improve accessibility in design?

Steven: Unfortunately for many individuals who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, design is not an accessible career. Low-income neighborhoods and schools de-prioritize their art programs due to their limited budgets, and BIPOC families rarely recommend design as a career to their children, possibly due to a lack of education and awareness of this industry as a viable and thriving industry.

Our organization’s mission is to address pivot points within the lives of our community members — when they shift careers or life trajectories based on passion and new insights. Currently, we are working with many adults who are either graduating college or transitioning from another career into design.

I have a firm belief that education coupled with an uplifting community is what’s needed to empower individuals to chase after their dream careers in design. Nobody should be gated from getting the design career of their dreams — regardless of their previous education, race, sexual identity, gender identity, or previous lived experience.

UX Fest: How can we all encourage more diverse design teams?

Steven: Currently, many tech companies have pledged to increase their diversity across various domains. However, if the corporate culture has not been radically improved to be more equitable and inclusive, diverse talent will leave the company as soon as they are hired.

In the past year, our organization has been creating various frameworks to help creative and product teams to re-evaluate their own culture and to create safe spaces for diverse perspectives. From design critiques to presentations, we have been challenging teams to create a radically different collaborate atmosphere — one that is free of judgement and inviting diverse, and potentially opposing perspectives, so that teams can be comfortable with diverse ways of thinking and solutioning. Not only does this make the culture more hospitable for diverse talent, current team members who may not have felt safe to voice their input also feel supported.

UX Fest: How do you view the relationship between design and business?

Steven: In the work of equity, businesses must find a balance between serving the business and the community. Uplifting marginalized communities should not be based on impact to the bottom-line of the business. We uplift those who are less disadvantaged than us because we have the means to do so. Otherwise, equity work becomes transactional only to serve corporate needs.

Design methodologies have gone through a metamorphosis in recent years, shifting from a sole designer-centric model (top-down) to a community-centric model (bottom-up) to better serve marginalized communities. Design Thinking as a practice has been iterated upon to invite more perspectives into the space, and has the potential to shift how we engage with our communities-at-large with our work. The practice of design may be very well the tool that businesses must rely on to implement new ways of equitable thinking.

UX Fest: How have you rallied your team through a very challenging time?

Steven: Our organization was founded in the midst of COVID — while the world was still trying to navigate through a global pandemic. The core team of QTBIPOC Design volunteers recognized the importance of supporting new design graduates and those shifting their careers into design during a period of massive layoffs and business closures. My work was to provide the volunteers and members the space to come together — clearing all barriers and vigilantly creating a safe space. With deep empathy and compassion for one another, our team rallied together to help one another stay afloat during this difficult time.

UX Fest: What advice would you give practitioners who are just starting out in their careers?

Steven: My advice: keep on going. The first job is always the hardest to secure — especially when we haven’t had the opportunity yet to work on projects to fill our portfolios. After the first job, it will become easier to move around the industry.

And if that means being creative with the first job, I highly recommend exploring various types of employment, including freelance work to get your foot into the door, but also get to try various companies and creative team dynamics.

Find a community that uplifts you and your work. One of the upsides of the pandemic has shifted countless design organizations to be online-only. What used to be only regional are now offered online and people from all over the world can attend their events. Try a few spaces and see which resonate.

UX Fest: Lastly, what’s the best thing you read/watched/listened to in 2020

Steven: There has been a tremendous amount of amazing films centering Asian perspectives in the last few months and I highly recommend everyone to watch Minari — a beautiful narrative of a Korean-American family’s journey through two divided cultures. There hasn’t been a film like this that captures so many subtleties of the Asian-American experience navigating immigration and finding a home in foreign America without overt romanticization or comedic prose.

We’re delighted to have Steven Speaking at the Festival on
Thursday 24th June, with his talk on building equitable design teams. Tickets here.

You can also join a masterclass with Steven on the 15th June on Creating Equitable Design teams.

• On twitter @wakuu

UX Fest is brought to you by Clearleft, a strategic design consultancy based in the UK. We work with global brands to design and redesign products and services, bring strategic clarity, and transform digital culture.