Rethinking “Design”
If I look back to the beginning of the semester, when I choose this course, I was wandering what design meant in this particular field. I had never considered myself a designer or something closer; but what was more interesting to me was the idea of using it to solve complex societal issues. How?
At the same time, knowing that we would have collaborated directly with a real organization that is working on a huge problem, such as migrant integration, gave me the idea that there was the opportunity to combine theory to practice, to action. There was the opportunity to work with people facing that problem, and that was for me very important.
The classes, the readings, the podcast that accompanied our journey, all gave me the opportunity to go deeper into the theory of design thinking. This quote from Dr. Prabhjot Singh, Director of Systems Design at the Earth Institute, resumes perfectly what design thinking means to me:
“We spend a lot time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it.”
Design thinking to me means going a step further than just thinking about design; in every field, whether in designing spaces, products, services, or policies, there is a need to think about the users, the people whose lives will be affected by our decisions and designs.
One great highlight of this semester, that gave me a huge opportunity to get to know a very inspiring reality, was my visit to CEPAC; they are a not-for-profit istitution, and their mission is to support immigrant people in vulnerable situations in building a project for a dignified and happy life.
Nèlia, one of the people working at CEPAC, was so kind to walk me through their spaces, explaining me the details of their services, their activities and of all the initiatives they have started to reach their goals, aligned with their mission. But she also talked about their struggles, their issues, the obstacles, what they would love to do but can’t, as of now. When it comes to deal with others people lives, it is not easy. It was also a personal experience during this course. It is difficult to accept the differences, the advantages we have and all the barriers and obstacles that instead migrants have. And it is difficult to accept that we can’t change the life of those people immediately. I was visiting with Nèlia the “MERCEARIA SABURA”, that is a grocery managed by CEPAC, in which migrants could go to do groceries free. The initiative could be undertaken thanks to donations of food from different big supermarket chains. Nèlia told me the number of families they are currently able to help with this initiative (more or less 200), but she was also thinking about the families that are asking them to join the program but at the moment can’t, since the food is not enough. It’s difficult. But this course gave me the energy and positivity to understand what we can do. And it is a lot.
What we did with the different group projects during the semester, was part of that contribution that could lead to a change. As a class, we had the opportunity to think about what we could have done to improve the integration journey of migrants arriving in Portugal. We, as a group, decided to focus on the problem of biases that companies have when it comes to hiring migrants. We experimented those biases by ourselves, when we had the opportunity to know our consultant from the Lisbon Project, Fred. He had multiple degrees and huge skills, and he was working hard to improve them day by day. That wasn’t what we expected.
After researches, and after the help of our professors’ team, we decided to focus on this problem. The highlight of this journey was the final workshop we had with companies this week, where we had the chance to test our assumptions, to test our hypothesis and to get valuable insights from experts with different backgrounds and coming from different industries.
All the participants shared their opinions, their tips and gave us lot of advices. It was really inspiring and beautiful to see such different professionals sharing together their points of view on a topic that most of the times could be perceived as a “tabu”. During hiring processes, highly skilled migrants, coming from non-western countries, are often not considered as valid as people coming from western world. We have seen that with our consultant and also with the ones of the other groups. One beautiful thing that happened during our workshop was that one of the participant shared, at the end of it, her personal experience. She was from Brasil, and even if she was living here in Portugal for the last 20 years, and had all her document, faced lot of discrimination and biases along the way. It was a very important moment, because reading numbers or listening to findings from studies is a thing, but hearing directly the experience of a person that have faced those barriers has an impact that is much bigger. And I will always bring that workshop, those findings, and that story with me.
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These are the different things that, from this journey, I bring with me. This semester has been difficult but amazing at the same time.
At the end, I understood how design thinking can help to solve societal issues! And I think that the key word here is “empathize”. We have to understand deeply the problem we want to solve, and being able to involve the people that are directly affected by that to co-create together a solution.
“The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you’re trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing — building empathy for the people that you’re entrusted to help.”
- David Kelley, IDEO founder
Thank you so much to AL, to Beatriz and Rita, and to my colleagues for have shared this incredible journey with me. And to everyone who sees not what the world is, but what it can be, keep dream!
