Intention of Impact
This story was written as part of Designing Courageous Conversations for Impact, a fall 2020 d.school course. This project was led by Gileen Navarro and Isha Kumar.
Acknowledgement: We want to acknowledge the amazing work that SWR has done and continues to do and our intention is not to overstep and insert ourselves into an issue in which our knowledge is limited. We want to emphasize that these were design prototypes and that we did not wish to impose the implementation of this. Our goal was conversation, feedback, and collaboration.
“I couldn’t believe that this was happening in places that I was in every day with people that I deeply cared about. And that I really had no idea. I wanted to do something about it. And that’s how I got into labor advocacy on campus. This perfect image of Stanford that I came to campus with was quickly shattered.” — Anonymous member of Stanford Student for Works Rights
We began this class deeply interested in the issue of worker’s rights at Stanford. After departing the Stanford’s campus in March, we began witnessing the propagation of headline after headline. All said the same thing: Stanford was laying off their workers for budgetary reasons due to Covid-19, refusing to offer severance pay to workers who had no idea their job was on the line. Those who remain on campus today, arguably performing some of the highest-risk jobs in a pandemic, perceive inadequate, or no PPE equipment, and are not being paid hazard pay. The issue of labor injustice at Stanford is a systemic issue, resulting from a combination of student ignorance and administrative failure. We have from our time as undergraduates living on campus, witnessed flagrant disrespect of workers. We have seen students leave dirty plates in their room or outside their doors for days, trash bathrooms when drunk, all the while without knowing the names of or saying hello to the service workers who clean up after them day after day. We started our project with this in mind, hoping to design a meaningful intervention that could help bring light to this issue. In particular, we hoped to focus on engagement with students who hail from privileged communities, who we noticed were the least engaged with worker’s rights issues.
We had heard of the impactful work that Stanford Students for Workers’ Rights had done, and we wanted to focus our time in this class to find potential ways to uplift this organization. We believe the most meaningful way to design is oftentimes not by creating an entirely new tool, cluttering the bureaucracy of Stanford further, but by understanding the ecosystem with a granular lens, and finding an opening where we might fit. This is exactly where we started, holding our first conversation with peers both experienced and inexperienced with labor rights issues. We held a roundtable with six other students, listening, gathering information, and brainstorming, ultimately to transform us from interested designers to more informed ones. From this conversation, we learned of the lack of empathy and the general lack of information leading to student disconnect, and brainstormed ways to frame labor with more positive rhetoric. We hoped to design a prototype that would celebrate workers. Our first two prototypes can be seen below.
After testing our prototype with the Stanford student body, we received valuable feedback. Realizing that both of our prototypes had feasibility issues and fulfilled only short term goals, we pivoted quickly. Our third prototype was the design of social media vignettes for Stanford Workers Rights. We had taken a cursory look at SWR’s instagram presence, and realized there was an opportunity for empathetic storytelling to increase engagement. We formulated the idea of “meet the worker” style posts, where students could get to know workers and their story, followed by a final page which provided action items encouraging students to engage with administration.
We tested this prototype with the Stanford Student body as well, creating a Google Forms questionnaire designed to track engagement and generate data in preparation for our next conversation with SWR members.
After synthesizing this data, we held our second conversation with members of SWR. We hoped to pitch our third prototype and begin a rapport with SWR, and our hopes were fulfilled. This conversation provided valuable feedback which directed the final iteration of our project. We learned that the visual design needed to be revised so as to be more symmetric with SWR’s current brand identity, and that the possibility of retaliation for workers who shared their stories was an obstacle to the content we envisioned. SWR also informed us of their archive of worker’s stories that remained unpublished during a similar campaign they conducted a few years ago. With this in mind, we pivoted the goal of our prototype to be more about empowering people to join forces with SWR to take action, believing empathy was the key to doing so. Our final prototype can be seen below.
We presented this, along with our design journey in our third conversation to administrative personnel and key stakeholders. We received feedback and encouragement to continue with our process, to partner with departments and disseminate the empathy narrative to key decision makers. At the end of this 10 week process, we feel hopeful, supported, and excited. We have learned the power of conversation goes beyond words; ultimately speaking and action are intimately connected, and the power of words can be a driver of change.
