The Role Positionality Plays in
Critical Design Thinking
I am not a designer.
I preface with this statement, so you know exactly where I am coming from.
I am a Vietnamese-American woman who grew up in the American South. My life has been shaped by my experiences as the eldest daughter of working-class immigrants, a big sister, a New Orleanian, and an undergrad studying Psychology and Economics. It was a combination of all of these identities that drew me to Design Thinking.
Recalling my first encounter with Design Thinking, I believe it was quite serendipitous. I overheard the term in passing and my ear perked up when I learned of its application for social innovation and societal impact. I was a starry-eyed college freshman who routinely daydreamed about the fight for a more just and equitable world. It took one quick Google search for me to find the infamous Stanford d. school’s colorful hexagon model for Design Thinking with its 5 prescribed steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.
Let me save you some time and tell you that the hexagon model’s representation of Design Thinking is inaccurate of its true nature. The process and mindset are anything but as linear, structured, or clean-cut. Design Thinking is complicated and messy, as is characteristic of a designer’s process.
My Design Thinking for Collective Impact professor and Design Thinking fellowship mentor, Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, presented Design Thinking to me in the form of cooking curry. This is the model that I reference the most when I am introducing Design Thinking to someone for the first time. Following a recipe may be a good starting point if curry is something completely foreign to you. It will help you identify some of the key main ingredients and teach you the general process. The more times you cook curry, the more familiar you become to what it looks like, smells like, and tastes like. You grow more comfortable and confident with how to cook curry. You begin to experiment with new ingredients or adjust their measurements to suit the tastes of your guests. Overtime, you let go of your recipe and trust your instincts.
The curry evolves with influence from the chef. Learning this lesson was key. After almost two years of orbiting and observing the Design Thinking world, I have noticed a critical ingredient that is missing from many of our well-intentioned endeavors. Many users of Design Thinking are skimping out on the topic of positionality!
Our social position in the world crafts our perspective and determines the cards we are dealt. Pascua Yaqui/Chicana scholar Marisa Duarte writes that positionality “requires researchers to identify their own degrees of privilege through factors of race, class, educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship, among others” (Duarte, 2017). It is dangerous and irresponsible to use Design Thinking or engage in any kind of social impact work without first analyzing how our identities influence our decision making, social exchanges, and power dynamics.
Social roles and identities affect the mental shortcuts (i.e. schemas, heuristics) we fall back on when our minds reach capacity, unable to process more new information. It is naïve to deny that prejudice and internal bias does not seep into our judgement from time to time. Names, for example, can be gender or racially affiliated, providing grounds for taste-based or statistical discrimination to occur. In 2012, an audit study of over 6,500 professors at top universities in the United States sought to investigate how informal discrimination acts as a barrier into academia. The researchers contacted the professors to discuss research opportunities and express interest in their doctoral program using fictional names that would signal the gender and race (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese) of the prospective student. The results of the study found that professors were significantly more likely to respond to a Caucasian male prospective student in comparison to all other students. This finding was especially true for professors from private universities and with higher-paying disciplines backgrounds (Milkman, Akinola, & Chugh, 2012). Sadly, the conclusions from this study are not rare among scientific literature in Diversity Psychology.
“Design is a cultural and political product,” says Mari de Mater O’Neill, a Puerto Rican artist, designer, and educator.
The work that we engage in are reflections of our beliefs and values. Positionality drives and guides the work that we do. In order to truly emphasize with the communities and individuals they are co-creating with, practitioners of Design Thinking must reflect on their own positionality and intersectionality. Ann Yoachim, professor of practice at Tulane School of Architecture and Director of the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, speaks on the necessary investment of Design Thinking practitioners, especially in the early stages of a project, to understand the historical background and context of the communities and individuals they are working with in her Pluriversal Design interview. This is how Design Thinking practitioners can minimize unintended harm and ensure for more sustainable outcomes.
Before Design Thinking practitioners begin their work, they must take the initiative to understand how they show up in their environment and how their identities impact the work that they take part in. The Positionality Web is a tool that can be used for prompting internal dialogues about one’s social position in the world. Occupation, region, class, age, ability, citizenship status, gender, and race are factors that influence privilege, status, and power.
In order to move towards a more critical Design Thinking, we must treat the process itself like a prototype with a perpetual beta mindset and constantly seek out avenues for improvement. Natasha Jen, Partner at Pentagram, gave a talk at the 2017 Adobe 99U Conference called “Design Thinking is Bullsh*t” where she emphasized the importance of “crit” in the design process. Design Thinking practitioners must invite critical feedback and criticism into the conversation — from both insiders and outsiders. Perspective is powerful. How you see the world, how you engage with it, and the questions that you ask are all valuable insights. Gathering perspectives will help us fill the gaps in equity in the world.
Tania Anaissie, Founder and CEO of Beytna Design, states it perfectly: “If we design in status quo ways, we will create status quo outcomes.”
References
Anaissie, T. (2019).“Pluriversal Design Interview for SISE 3010.”
Duarte, M. E. (2017). Network sovereignty building the internet across Indian country. Seattle: University of Washington.
Jen, N. (2020). Design Thinking Is Bullsh*t. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://99u.adobe.com/videos/55967/natasha-jen-design-thinking-is-bullshit
Mater O’Neill, M. (2019) “Pluriversal Design Interview for SISE 3010.”
Milkman, K., Akinola, M., & Chugh, D. (2012). What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2063742
Yoachim, A. (2019). “Pluriversal Design Interview for SISE 3010.”
