Intention of Impact
Taking a class called “Designing Courageous Conversations for Impact” this quarter, I wanted to learn more about what I could do through design to enact change. This experience was an opportunity for me to learn about advocacy work, community organizing, and the importance of open and humble intentions.
“In this class, we will explore complex concepts of systemic and interpersonal oppression and racism, understand how these concepts manifest on our campus and in our communities, then design and prototype meaningful interventions for impact.”
On the first day of class, they told us that, by the end of the quarter, we would be talking to actual stakeholders and decision-makers about the injustices and inequalities that many experience in higher education. This intimidated me, but it made the possibility of impact seem more reachable.
My project partner Isha and I chose to focus on the issue of workers’ rights at Stanford, especially after hearing about the mass layoffs due to COVID-19 and the seemingly poor methods of communication and leadership that the university was displaying. Neither of us had ever really been involved in the organization called Stanford Students for Workers’ Rights (SWR) or had done any workers’ rights advocacy in the past. We wanted to take this opportunity through the class to learn more about the issue and find ways to create meaningful impact.
On the first of three conversations that we were to have in class, Isha and I decided on inviting just any student who was free to attend. Our purpose behind this decision was to get a general sense of the workers’ rights issue on campus in the context of student life and experiences. We were told stories about students being disrespectful and rude to the service workers, the disparity between ‘slush funds’ for alcohol purchases versus monetary contributions to worker donation initiatives, and the dehumanizing nature of how administration treated workers in general. “Yeah, administration specifically tells workers not to interact with students,” said one student that we invited to the conversation, “honestly, it might be to make sure that they don’t talk about any workers’ rights violations to the students.”
After sharing these stories, our group of students immediately launched into brainstorming action items. Some ideas leaned toward celebratory initiatives (a ‘Get to know Workers’ day!) while others focused more on structural change, like changing the way the institution frames labor or training a house student staff position to be knowledgeable about workers’ issues. Having this conversation helped Isha and I not only visualize possible interventions we could design, but it also helped us establish our project question: How can we get more people involved in workers’ rights issues?
Workers’ Week was a week-long event that was specifically about, for, and contributed to by workers, which we ended up scrapping due to its lack of sustainability (and longevity) and its potential to overlap with programming by orgs like SWR. The Workers’ Lobby was an idea of a physical space on campus for people to learn about workers’ rights, find ways to get involved, and donate, which we had to drop since it was impossible for us to physically prototype.
While we went through these two prototypes, I felt uneasy about everything we were doing. It felt wrong to have no prior knowledge or experience about the issue we were working on. I felt like I shouldn’t be overstepping on the work that already established orgs had already been doing (for a 10-week long class), like I was taking up space in an issue I knew next to nothing about and claiming that I could solve things with the design thinking process. In a breakout room with Isha during class, I finally brought this up to her, and she shared these concerns. After talking about it, we decided we should definitely be using our opportunity in this class to help uplift the work of organizations like SWR, essentially joining forces with them to impact change.
With this newfound resolve, we decided that unsustainable events and physical prototypes were not the best ways to uplift SWR and encourage involvement with workers’ rights advocacy. We knew about the SWR Instagram page and their powerful social media presence, and we decided to hone in on thinking about ways to increase their online engagements and, in turn, empower people to engage with the work.
Our idea was a new kind of social media slide set that SWR could post. With this prototype, we wondered if sharing specific stories told by workers would garner more empathy from others and, in turn, encourage more engagement with the issue.
For our second conversation in the class, we specifically invited members of SWR so that we could begin our rapport with them and they could take a look at our design idea for their social media. I was nervous for this conversation because I was still feeling like I was overstepping, but SWR was very receptive to our project and open to our prototype! They gave us very good feedback, such as changing the design to better match their current social media, revising the action item slide to be more relevant to current SWR campaigns, and pivoting the project to be more anonymous for workers to avoid any risks of retaliation. They also agreed with our concerns that it would be very difficult to gather personal stories from workers right now, but told us about their archive of workers’ stories that they had gathered in the past and never published. All in all, this was an amazing opportunity to have because it was an open and safe space for conversation, collaboration, and feedback. I felt empowered and encouraged about the project after knowing that we would now have members of SWR step-by-step with our process.
With their feedback, we redesigned the slide set to be more readable, relevant, and shareable. Although we weren’t able to test online engagement on social media by rolling out the prototype due to the election, our third conversation in the class was coming up. This conversation was the final conversation we would have, in which the teaching team had invited “VIP stakeholders” to attend and listen to our project presentations.
Isha and I presented to them our design thinking process throughout the entire quarter, ending on a series of questions that we hoped would give us insight onto administrative perspectives on workers’ rights issues. Our main takeaways from that third conversation was that 1) there are people in administration who are willing to get involved in workers’ rights advocacy if they knew how to, and 2) the big decision makers regarding workers’ rights issues were not present in that third conversation. “I’m not even sure how high this issue goes up the institutional ladder,” said one of our guests. “I was sad to hear about the mass layoffs, but I wasn’t sure how to get involved,” said another.
My final thoughts about this project are more relevant to the title of this article, Intention of Impact. Although we haven’t rolled out our social media prototypes yet and although our third conversation did not have the big administrative decision makers, I am happy with my group’s decision to not take this issue on by ourselves. I believe the most important outcome out of doing this project was that, ultimately, we are working with an organization that does this work and advocacy for way more than a 10-week long class. I did not have the opportunity in this class to engage with the higher up stakeholders who held workers’ rights decisions in their hands, but this work is bigger than this class and bigger than myself. Join SWR: bit.ly/joinSWR
