Equity Design for Collaboration: RDC and Equitable Collaboration with UC Davis

TL;DR: Developing innovation spaces which includes discussion of power and politics in socially productive manners is possible! We developed a space for UC Davis environmental justice collaborators to find out how. If you want to, come to our SF Design Week workshop on community co-design.

What value does design thinking offer to equitably-minded experts? It’s hard to tell, until we work to stretch its capacity. This is why we were especially excited to facilitate a workshop as collaborators for the Community Engagement Core of the University of California Davis’ Environmental Health Science Center. We were invited to be part of a meeting for their Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee (CSTAC).

CSTAC is a group of community-based organizations in California, working across a wide variety of topics including access to clean, affordable water, rectifying stark inequality in rural regions, reforming pesticide use, advocating for public health education, and much more. Our colleagues at UC Davis are working to set up equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships between CSTAC members and UC Davis academic researchers. To do so, they rely upon an approach called community-based participatory research (CBPR), a “partnership approach to research that equitably involves, for example, community members, organizational representatives, and researchers in all aspects of the research process and in which all partners contribute expertise and share decision making and ownership.”

Biennally, the CSTAC comes together to conduct business, to report on news, and to conduct a workshop to learn about how to move forward. This year, that’s where RDC came in. As you might expect, RDC’s guiding principles have much in common with the CBPR field, so there’s a great opportunity for alignment. However, there’s an issue here: what new added value would we bring to the UC Davis and CSTAC?

Moreover, we came across a unique obstacle: as the community had worked with power mapping before (a description of how we use this method is in this blog post) and, as we heard, they were interested in other methods and mindsets. As politically-minded designers, this was a big concern: how do we facilitate power-laden conversations, without our often-used method to understand power?

After extensive development and relationship building, we learned our critical contribution to CSTAC and UC Davis was the development of resources towards more equitable collaboration. By asking questions to make sure participants name their assumptions, discuss them, and learn about who has the power to collaborate and why, we could interweave questions of power into the need to create supportive and equitable collaborations. Some points made by the stakeholders included:

• For people involved in CBPR work, developing these relationships hold many pain points. Community-based organizations and academic researchers obtain few opportunities to learn about the experiences, expertises, and baggage they bring to the table.
• Power dynamics in the room must be addressed, in a diplomatic manner. People must be able talk about their own experiences in a way that doesn’t set up adversarial relationships. Working together in a CBPR project have to be able to understand how and why power dynamics are complex.

To do these things, we made these frames the focus of the workshop:

• Building empathy/understanding for CSAC members to learn about other stakeholders’s experiences,
• Building context for the importance of collaboration as an important, but contentious activity,
• Developing skills for naming pain points and scenario-building interventions to address potential frictions, and
• prototyping workshops for future use by the committee members themselves.

To facilitate these activities, we used and developed some new methods to ensure a productive and respectful innovation space. Check them out below.

Goals Alignment

Here, we develop a space for the partners to be selfish. We ask them: why are you here? Why are other stakeholders (researchers, community-based organizations) here?

They then have an opportunity to chart which goals are personal, and which goals are mutually aligned. To understand how communities work together, naming these types of goals in a partnership is essential.

Baggage Check

Here, we ask the community to be vulnerable. These community members bring personal experiences and struggles; they represent bosses, constituents, bureaucratic restraints and much more.

By putting the partners in groups to plainly discuss their own personal or institutional restraints plainly, it starts relationships on honest grounds and better directs ways forward for logistical solutions.

Experience Roll Call

Now, it’s time to boost up our egos! We don’t just bring conflicting goals and baggage to the partnership table, we also bring human, social, and institutional capacities.

Now, most of those capabilities — skills, experience, knowledge, and visible gaps — are normally invisible to our partners. Why not make them known, and learn how we can help each other?

Developing Solutions

Now, it’s time to brainstorm for the prototype. Here, we ask this question, to lead into a space where design thinking truly shines: learning how to address these pain points with interventions the participants come up with themselves. In this part of the workshop,w e gave the community an opportunity to play again: to make, create, analogize, draw, and present for the future.

So we can reflect on this workshop, and ask ourselves the question: what made this workshop successful?

• A receptive, collaborative community.
• A community willing to be honest to itself and others.
• Tangible group relationships that have worked before, and will continue to develop after the workshop is complete.

Luckily, the workshops group came together, and appreciated what we have to offer. Unfortunately, the workshop can only do so much in a single day. We designed with this in mind, however; by developing a highly creative, collaborative environment, it entices the members of the workshop to learn more, try more methods, and maybe, further integrate design thinking methods into their activities.

And, soon enough, the community might do what they wanted from us in the beginning to actively use design thinking to address their own organizational issues.

So, how is design thinking valuable to you? What new problems plague your partnerships, and what needs to happen to develop solutions to your unique issues of equity and politics?

Contact us, and let’s find out how to do it together.

New call to action! Looking for a way to learn about our method of collaborative co-design?

• Are you a designer? Trick question, the answer is yes.
• Are you interested in learning about, and challenging, issues of equity in your work and personal life?
• Are you in the Bay Area?

Reflex Design Collective has had years of experience facilitating community co-design towards addressing issues of equity, power, and politics. Our team has deep experience in design+health, global poverty issues, in product implementation, service design, and much more, all while learning about how this emergent space must include understanding history, reframing who has the power to make design decisions, and asking about how we as designers position ourselves while addressing these wicked problems. Come challenge your mind, your practice, and the institutions at bay.

A few months ago, our team had the blessed opportunity to present our work at SxSW for the first time — but hopefully, not the last. You get the chance to experience an encore. Find out more, and join the collective.