Meet SIL Social Design Fellow 2022: Samantha Novak
In this interview with SIL Social Design Fellow Samantha (Sam) Novak, we learn more about her journey to become a specialist in whole systems design in the social change space. We also hear her reflections from working with SIL teams throughout our 2021–22 Accelerator program.
Sam provided SIL’s teams with introductory training on human-centered design, support in their customer discovery process, and finally helped to synthesize findings from their 20+ interviews with stakeholders.
Tell us about your journey before moving to Baltimore.
I was born in Baltimore and lived here until I was about 10 years old. Although I have lived all over the country, Baltimore is my first home. I was raised on blue crabs, Berger cookies, and Orioles baseball.
My mother is a Montessori school teacher and my father is a salesman, so I was born into a family, shaped by learning and taking action.
With Baltimore and my family as my foundation, I moved out west in 2010 to pursue a passion for environmental philosophy and- unknowingly- a master’s degree in designing social change.
Early in my career, I wanted to explore every level and facet of social justice and community action to make a positive and effective impact. As an AmeriCorps volunteer, I got my hands in the soil, managed volunteers in service projects, and created nature-based educational programs. As a case manager, I worked one-on-one with clients to access resources to transition from houselessness. As a community organizer, I spear-headed local environmental justice initiatives, designed outreach strategies, and planned community events. As a non-profit board member I analyzed policy, built partnerships, and learned the ins-and-outs of organizational strategy.
Serving my community in diverse roles opened my eyes to the joys, challenges, and complexities of implementing change across varied and intersecting justice movements. And I noticed the same patterns showed up no matter the scale, sector, cause, or community. This inspired me to learn more about the processes, relationships, and structures of creating change.
In 2012 I began pursuing my master’s degree in Whole Systems Design in the Graduate Programs in Leadership and Change at Antioch University Seattle. The Center for Creative Change also hired me to collaborate with faculty, students, and community partners on both local and global leadership development projects. For two years, academically and professionally, I swam in the waters of systemic thinking, social design, and adaptive leadership. Through the marriage of theory and practice and the ongoing cycle of reflection and action, I began to learn more deeply (and continue to learn every day) the processes, relationships, and structures of sustainable, transformative change.
Why did you decide to move back to Baltimore?
Towards the end of my tenure on the west coast, I suffered several simultaneous and stability-shattering losses. I tried hard to stay out west and “stick it out” or “just push through it,” But that is rarely, if ever, an effective solution. I was hurt and needed to heal. I needed the care and safety of my community of origin.
We don’t talk about it much, but healing is a form of change. And healing is hard.
When I moved home, I spent about two years simply embracing and centering the slow process of mending my emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical health. It was the first time that I took a real professional break. It was one of the most painful and challenging eras of my journey, and it was the most nourishing and joyful to date. And, it was clear that I would need to take all that learning about enacting transformative change from my degree, turn towards myself, and apply those lessons to my own life.
I moved to Mount Vernon in 2017 and settled into Baltimore, ready to work and be of service to the city I call home.
In 2018, you first engaged with the Social Innovation Lab at an Impact Bootcamp. Tell us about that first interaction and any takeaways that have remained with you today.
Yes! The Social Innovation Lab Bootcamp was my first touchpoint into the entrepreneurial support ecosystem in Baltimore. I was finding the pulse of the city, exploring the professional landscape, and learning how and where I fit in. That’s about the time I found the SIL Bootcamp.
Participating in that Bootcamp was so impactful. It was clear that a powerful network of folks in Baltimore was working from the ground up. They cared deeply for the people and were working to move our city further towards equity and justice. And, there was a whole ecosystem of organizations and institutions who wanted to empower, grow and amplify the impact of those efforts. I began to understand the scaffolding of organizations that could help me go from ideation to early-stage development if I chose the entrepreneurial path.
Time and time again, working within and beside various people and spaces in Baltimore has further proven my initial experience at the Bootcamp. I am constantly inspired by the dreamers, educators, cultural workers, healers, stewards, thinkers, and artists leading this city. And I appreciate the organizations and institutions learning how to listen, elevate, and support in fundamentally different ways.
In 2021, you started your own consulting business. What is the mission and vision of your new venture? How do you hope to add value to your target customers?
In 2018, right around the SIL Bootcamp, I’d been dreaming and co-piloting systems thinking and leadership development programming alongside my now business partner-Kasey Armstrong. In December 2021, we officially founded Loam.
Loam is a social design and facilitation practice that envisions just and joyful futures. We believe change-making is a slow, sacred work done in difficult terrain. Loam teaches and models whole systems praxis to bring agency and aliveness to the spaces where we work, learn, and lead.
We live in a world built on layered structures of oppression and extraction, designed through a mechanical lens. We are all expected to constantly produce, be quiet, fit in, go faster, and accept the status quo. No matter the community or cause, effort, or ecosystem, every changemaker is shaped by and working within these isolating and exhausting systems. Loam empowers changemakers on both individual and collective scales to compost toxic paradigms while building capacity to lead a future of social change that prioritizes relationship, emergence, complexity, rest, and care. We offer nourishing community, creative strategy, and tangible skills to practice and design new models for transformative change.
You’ve created spaces for communities to practice self-care by leading hikes and Emergent Strategy retreats during the pandemic. How do you create space for yourself to practice self-care?
I created spaces for rest, realignment, and connection because I know how difficult it is to do that for ourselves and for our communities as a changemaker.
Here’s what I am constantly learning about creating space to take care of myself: the only way to create space is to create space– the world isn’t going to permit me. I have to be brave enough to say no, listen to my body, set boundaries, take breaks, advocate for my needs, move at my own pace, choose how I want to grow, follow my intuition, and leave situations that are no longer serving or are actively harming me. I have to remind myself that it’s OK to put myself first. It’s OK to disappoint others. And it’s OK to show up exactly as I am, even if (especially if!) it challenges the status quo.
Care-taking is not easy work. But I know this- I cannot thrive without caring for myself or surviving without caring for my community. We all deserve a care-taking practice. This practice is a personal imperative and a professional calling as I’ve committed to creating abundant, joyful, and human-centered spaces for changemakers to work, learn, and lead with Loam.
How can and should entrepreneurs be thinking about applying human-centered design principles to their work?
I don’t know the “official” list of principles for human-centered design. No model is right, some models are useful. That changes and grows as we learn and expand the field. And some of the principles I hold as fundamental to my social design practice are shaped by alternative frameworks.
However, the human-centered design principles are practical if you want to create change in your markets, organizations, or communities. Here are some fundamental principles of human-centered design (in no particular order):
- empathy- understand people’s needs, motivations, and emotions
- collaboration- there’s strength and creativity in numbers
- experiment and generate lots of possibilities
- produce real outcomes with big impacts
- the learning process never ends, always be iterating
- optimism is central- change is possible
These principles are only valuable in practice for entrepreneurs and all other folks who identify as changemakers. Some places where you can practice human-centered design include product development, customer discovery, program design, policy writing, facilitating a meeting, responding to email, analyzing finances, 5-year strategic planning, deciding your new employee salaries, etc.
You don’t have to be a design expert. Far from it. These design principles can be daily touchstones for how to see, relate, and interact with your business, community, partners, funders, employees, projects, and clients.
If you’re feeling unsure about how to work from these human-centered design principles, here are a few questions that may help you realign:
- Have I invited multiple voices or people into this conversation? Who is missing?
- Am I willing to take a risk? What is holding me back? What is inspiring me to make the leap?
- What were the lessons or opportunities I could learn from this failure?
- Who or what else was involved in this success? Who benefited from it? Who didn’t?
- How can I ensure people around me feel considered, seen, and heard?
- What do I want to solve? What will really solve it?
- What other possibilities exist right now?
What are emerging trends in design for social innovation that programs should pay attention to? (i.e. systems thinking)
The predominant lens we’ve taught and approached design and design-thinking has been white-washed for a long time. Books like The Black Experience in Design are collecting and sharing the stories and perspectives of Black designers. While movements like Afrofuturism are pushing the world of design to see the nature and process of design as collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, and interdisciplinary. A few design trends born from this lens are equity design, liberatory design, and design justice. Programs should pay attention to those trends.
I will continue to advocate that moving social design in this direction is not simply a “trend” in the field but a paradigmatic imperative for design, social innovation, and the western world-at-large.
Another similar trend in design is the intersection of whole systems thinking and facilitative leadership.
Whole systems thinking is a way of understanding how distinct elements relate, behave, and belong. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And, a system’s behavior over time is understood in relationship with its context, structure, and purpose. Whole systems are alive, communicative, interdependent, complex, emergent, nested, and fractal.
Facilitative leadership involves holding space and leading processes that source the group’s collective wisdom to determine shared purpose and a collaborative plan of action. Design offers a way of looking at characteristics of a product, space, service, or system to illuminate and implement meaningful opportunities.
In concert, these frameworks can enact radical shifts in structure, power, and purpose. They offer practices and tools that can bring agency, equity, care, collective ownership, and structural change to our spaces, organizations, and communities.
What has been the most rewarding part of your interaction with the SIL teams thus far?
Facilitating the learning and practice of human-centered design for the group is fun, but I treasure the intimate moments that emerge in our one-one-one meetings. I get to learn so much about their lives, passions, and work while providing a collaborative and affirming space. As an entrepreneur myself, I know those moments can be a relief and a blessing.
Asking open-ended, story-eliciting questions is one of my greatest gifts and I love to support the entrepreneurs in building deep connections with the people and communities they serve through the often daunting task of customer discovery. In these one-on-one meetings, my job is to be a thought-partner in developing their customer discovery questions through a human-centered design lens. It’s an opportunity to co-design pockets of joy into the process.
What makes you excited about the Baltimore entrepreneurial ecosystem?
I’ve had the pleasure of learning about and working within Baltimore’s entrepreneurial ecosystem since 2018, and it continues to impress and excite me. The two elements that feel the most present for me while working beside the Social Innovation Lab is Baltimore’s focus on equity and a genuine embrace of the social design field. I appreciate that the organizations and institutions in Baltimore are learning how to listen, elevate, and support BIPOC and women entrepreneurs, artists, activists, stewards, educators, thinkers, and leaders in fundamentally different ways. We’ve got a long way to go. But, Baltimore is committed to collaboratively redesigning the relationships and structures- personal, collective, organizational, institutional, and cultural- that can transform our interdependent and nested social systems towards alive and equitable futures.
Interested to get in touch with Sam or learn more about her new venture Loam? Reach out to samantha.novak11@gmail.com.
