How can we be Responsible, Sensitive and Conscious Designers? (11/11)

On Wednesday, Hannah du Plessis joined us for a lecture. She is a principal at Fit Associates and led a discussion today on how we can be more responsible, sensitive, and conscious designers.

Starting off with an introduction, Hannah shared her background with us. She first worked as an interior designer and hoped to diffuse the race divide she saw in South Africa. She asked herself,

Who am I serving? Who is benefitting from my work, who is excluded, marginalized, or exploited?

In interior design, she realized that there were a lot of people who were excluded because they could not afford it — she was helping people with money to get more money.

From this experience, she switched careers to design research & strategy. In this line of work, the common question is “What should we make?” However, “making” is generally in service to the industry and not people to the ground, once again excluding people.

From then, she moved to social design and asked the question, “Who are we becoming?” Her design intention is to use her life to work towards a world that works for all in a more equitable world. One of the ways to do this is to collaborate with people involved such as the intended audience as they are more likely to cover our blind spots and can contribute to the design.

One idea she shared with us were, “Agreements.” If we don’t create agreements, we recreate the social norms that we are used to.

What does it mean to be a responsible, sensitive, conscious designer? Here are some questions to ponder: What is the impact of your work? As designers, we can be aware of history: what are the patterns we are used to following? How am I (personally/relationally/project wide) repeating or shifting it? How do I know that my work is useful?

Some routes we can take are just being aware of the habitual reactions to close down instead of staying in an open, curious relationship. We can also have an accountability partner or co-create with those who will be affected by this work. Other ways are to recognize your identities and how you hold power and privilege in some of them such as your race, class, and more. In this way, we can also honor intergenerational trauma that might exist in behavior.

Hannah sees history through the lens of patterns. Being aware of how these patterns repeat, what perpetuates them, and how they have been successfully disrupted help us be aware of our role in sharing and growing a group’s resources. She also brought up the key challenge in this type of project is how to see your impact, how to visualize your results.

At this point, we paused for students to ask questions of Hannah about how these concepts might relate to what the students were working on for their final. Hannah gave some general advice that if we are sincerely learning, the world will learn with us; to not let failure stop you and learn how to make an apology so that you can feel more confident.

Finally, the class shared some thoughts after this lecture on this discussion. Here are some of them to think about:

• How we can practice mindfulness as a designer
• Understanding one’s own identity and privilege is a way to contribute to the design
• Being considerate of others’ varied experiences
• Taking a second to analyze/reflect on how a conversation makes you feels internally before reacting outwardly
• Learning to push outside of what might feel normal or expected and to question the restrictions of current systems

Considering and incorporating these thoughts will train us to become responsible, sensitive and conscious designers. Hope you all had a good weekend!