Irit Pollak’s damn good job
Irit, 28, is Design Research Lead at Doteveryone.
What do you do?
I’m a social designer and producer.
Right now I’m the Design Research lead at Doteveryone, I produce a podcast about social change called Private Parts and I’m working with WIGS, a new UK-based social design organisation, on a long-term project about social change in an ex-mining town.
At Doteveryone the work I do ranges from prototyping ways businesses can champion trustworthy technology to telling the stories of the people behind vital services, like farming and law centres, to engage policy makers, funders and the public the unexpected changes they’re facing.
How did you get the job?
I studied design at The University of Technology in Sydney and Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London.
After university I worked in the arts in Sydney for a couple of years before taking on a job with a world-first design strategy team in 2014 at Deloitte Consulting. It was confronting and mildly horrifying to find myself in the corporate world, but also exhilarating to start applying the design mindset and tools to organisational and societal challenges.
In the first year I worked on some great projects with universities and state emergency services but I was also presented with the first moral challenge of my professional life — doing strategy work for BHP. It broke me. I set up a meeting with my boss thinking that I’d walk out of it an ex-employee but I ended up with a new contract — a part-time role focusing specifically on social innovation projects. These included working with NSW Government on a community-led response to countering violent extremism through to designing new services for severely disabled people and making a documentary with Kids off the Kerb, a social enterprise that gets disadvantaged young people into sustainable employment.
“it’s been an excellent way to balance stability with space for experiments and collaboration.”
To their credit, Deloitte listened to let me do this and it changed my outlook in a number of ways. In terms of the way I spend my time working, it helped me realise that there’s a lot more freedom than we think and that more often than not we shut down alternative ways of working mostly because we feel we don’t deserve something better or that we feel we’ll be judged for breaking the mould — in this case I’d always thought that working part-time was reserved for people who had kids or were semi-retired but since then I’ve really found that it’s been an excellent way to balance stability with space for experiments and collaboration.
So outside Deloitte I started the Private Parts podcast, which I still produce today, as well as a range of other projects including a children’s book, responsive performance art and a long-term storytelling project with Professor Nick Enfield about a remote tribe in Laos called The Kri.
In late 2016 I came to London on a bit of a reconnaissance mission to figure out if it was the right next step. I met Cassie Robinson, the Strategic Design Director at Doteveryone, and moved over to start working with her and the team in early 2017.
Why do you give a damn about it?
I care about what Doteveryone does because with more than half the world online now the internet affects everything from healthcare, work, housing, and education to environmental sustainability and human rights.
Through helping people understand how the internet works and testing practical ways as well as wild ideas to make it fairer, we’re re-distributing power and providing entry points for different kinds of people to shape our future.
“humans are almost detrimentally good at adapting to the way things are but in fact any system we’re living in is changeable”
To borrow from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” I love this because it reminds me that humans are almost detrimentally good at adapting to the way things are but in fact any system we’re living in is changeable.
Ask yourself anything.
Q: Is a (practically) all female team working in tech problematic?
A: No because there are still less women working in tech, on average, than in British Parliament. And yes, because I’d like to share our mum-led, unique way of working with more men!
Irit is on Instagram and you can listen to her podcast, ‘Private Parts’, here.
