Practice with Purpose
What does it mean to practice with purpose? Why do we practice with purpose? How does this manifest when designing?
Co-authored by Kristin Hendrix (Director of UX Research, Science) and Catherine Winfield (Director of Product Design, Education) from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
At CZI, our design team members work hard to ensure their design practice is heavily rooted in and motivated by purpose. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, a member of CZI’s education team has written that developing a sense of purpose, understanding what excites and drives us and valuing how our communities shape us, is a building block for life-long success. For us, it means we infuse into our work everyday the deep-seated purpose of solving real problems in the social impact space, both as participants in doing rewarding work and as partners in co-creating solutions with those impacted by the work we do. It takes the form of ensuring there are diverse perspectives informing and shaping the work we do. It means co-creating and co-designing with community members impacted by the systemic issues we are trying to address — the individuals with lived experiences and expertise. It means supporting and partnering with the individuals and communities who are already themselves doing incredible work and generating social impact.
Practicing with purpose means regularly asking hard questions like,
- “Why are we doing this? Are we the ones to be doing this work? To what end? Should this technology, tool, or service even exist?”
- “How might we create and design with intention to solve actual, high-impact problems?”
- “How do we ensure we include diverse perspectives from individuals with lived experiences and varying expertise even when — especially when — those individuals might be hard to find? People from a variety of races, ethnicities, genders, abilities, socioeconomic statuses … ”
- “Are we actually designing to meet the stated and unstated needs of the communities impacted by our work? Are we solving real problems and having helpful, positive impact?”
Practicing with purpose means listening to and really hearing the answers to these hard questions. It means course-correcting or soul-searching when the process doesn’t feel equitable or inclusive. It might mean taking more time to uncover and include perspectives from underserved and hard-to-reach individuals. It means creating and designing in ways that defy and help eradicate the heavily-ingrained systemic barriers to inclusion. It means constantly examining our biases and privilege to ensure that impacted communities are active participants in creating and designing tools to solve problems. It means practicing in ways that there may not be any roadmap or blueprint for, and it means being inspired to help solve problems that might be seemingly unsolvable. It means designing with versus designing for.
On the topic of infusing purpose into one’s work, the CZI Design team hosted an event this past summer as part of San Francisco Design Week, called “Practice with Purpose.” Speakers who design and create across a variety of domains, including education, science, and within the criminal justice system, came together to talk about what practicing with purpose means to them. Each presenter had a unique perspective on what it means to them to practice with purpose, specifically the practice of co-creation and participatory design. Here, as we near the last few months of 2019, we reflect on each of the presenter’s talks, sharing thought-provoking insights and key take-aways to carry forward.
Nigel Poor, story-teller, educator, visual artist and photographer, and documenter-of-life, spoke about her work with incarcerated individuals at San Quentin State Prison. Together, they created Ear Hustle, a podcast that shares stories and reflections about the daily lives of the people inside San Quentin, as well as stories from their experiences after release. Nigel shared her own experiences in co-creating a podcast alongside individuals at San Quentin and how important it is for people in prison to be able to tell their stories. According to Nigel, “Art is about communication, and it matters that the work creates a conversation. It doesn’t matter how many people are in the conversation but that it starts one.” This conversation (born out of one of her storytelling workshops at the prison) led to the creation of Ear Hustle,where both she and those she worked with — like co-host Earlonne Woods, whose sentence was recently commuted — created the now very popular podcast. She stressed the importance of not only co-creating, but also co-learning a new skill, to produce something.
Thought leader Caroline Hill, who works as an educator, mentor, and founder at the intersection of education, equity, and innovation shared her work rooted in the equityXdesign framework she co-created. Her work is motivated by the unreconciled history of the United States which persists today via “[empowerment of] a chosen few with the privilege of invention, innovation, and creativity, that lay the groundwork for misunderstanding, fear, and ultimately hate. Caroline shared her work of facilitating the creation of truancy policies with students, truancy officers and policy makers highlighting how the role of a designer fundamentally shifts in an equitable design practice.
We also heard from CZI product designer, Jenn Tang, and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub scientist, Vida Ahyong. Jenn and Vida jointly shared their experiences co-creating IDseq, a cloud-based and open-source platform and service designed to enable real-time global disease surveillance and prevention. Developed in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, it works by rapidly combing through terabytes of metagenomic data for pathogens in a given sample, such as a bacterium, virus, fungus, or parasite. The design of IDseq is a process rooted in participatory design and co-creation between Jenn as IDseq’s product designer and subject matter experts, like Vida. IDseq aims to serve a variety of user groups with different goals, making collaborative design all the more important to ensure the diverse needs of these groups are being met. The close collaboration between Jenn and subject matter experts like Vida helps decrease the turnaround time for design changes, testing, and implementing into the IDseq tool.
Lastly, we heard from CZI product designer Alexis Turim, who shared her work facilitating the creation of mentoring tools with teachers, who as part of the Summit Learning Program mentor students over the course of their time within the program, helping them build habits of success like growth mindset and agency. Alexis focused on the importance of collaborating with teachers to understand their current work-arounds. This meant a better shared understanding of students’ mentoring needs in both the time teachers were allocating and how they were scheduling mentorship for each student. She shared “Designers play the role of facilitator, ushering the process and capturing teacher expertise, building it into a tool that can support their needs.” By facilitating the process with teachers, more robust solutions emerged and has already resulted in improved experiences for teachers.
Throughout the talks, we heard themes of infusing purpose and intentionality into designing and creating, most resoundingly the importance of designing with versus designing for. Each speaker stressed that to do good, purposeful work, they regularly had to actively ask the bigger why behind the work, and they regularly sought the perspectives of the underserved, the under-heard, and the marginalized.
Keep a watch for other events the CZI Design team hosts in the future! If you want to be a part of the CZI Design team’s efforts and are passionate about practicing with purpose, we’d love for you to join us!
