Use Cultural Strategy To Design For ALL Recap
In the wake of the revitalization and persistence of the Black Lives Matter movement, we wanted to interrogate our role as strategists in fighting for, creating, and designing a more just and equitable world. Last week we explored how racism is our cultural default (aka the lens of dominant culture as the default or norm) and a product of design that can and should be redesigned. Then, we dove straight into the key questions and principles that would guide the strategic and creative process to center equity via the Design for Diversity™ framework. And finally, we unpacked the different levels of racism, barriers, and historical cultural defaults that have and will continue to live out in the world — that is, until we begin redesigning against dominant culture, and instead, for ALL.
A huge thank you to Wethos for partnering with us to make tickets more accessible to all, Project Inkblot’s community for sponsoring discounted tickets for BIPOC folks, and, of course, the incredible Boyuan Gao and Jahan Mantin, founder and principals of Project Inkblot, for teaching us invaluable skills and actionable tools to bring into our own work.
Best Bites
- “Diversity and inclusion are only metrics for equity. Equity addresses the root cause. Diversity and inclusion are the outcomes. They show you if equity is present.” Boyuan grounded us in shared language and stressed that our focus is on centering equity. We need equity before true diversity and inclusion can follow.
- “Your business defaults are your cultural defaults. Part of this whole conversation around equity is that it’s relegated to a siloed department or ERG and it’s not core or central to the business. That actually impedes the business’ ability to innovate during these cultural shifts.” When asked to journal where cultural defaults exist in our own orgs, someone commented that cultural defaults often fall secondary to business defaults. Boyuan challenged this notion that business and cultural defaults are not one in the same and therefore has critical implications both on the health of the business, as well as on the health of their employees and products.
- “If you focus on those that are most impacted, you can create strategies, policies, and content that can expand out and benefit all.” Jahan and Boyuan introduced a radical design strategy called “Targeted Universalism”, which when paired with anti-racism — creates solutions that are beneficial for all by centering the needs of those most impacted by racism. However, it is important to note that targeted universalism is not anti-racist by nature and has often been used in terms of accessible design but it is a very useful lens to bring into anti-racist design work. They pushed human-centered design thinking’s default process of designing for all and assuming that all have the same needs and desires.
Go Deeper
- Liked what you saw? Check out Project Inkblot’s website to learn more and inquire about partnership opps. Or at the very least, check out their InkBlog for resources and additional content, or their glossary for a deeper dive into this shared language.
- Support brands and organizations like Fenty Beauty by Rihanna and Black Lives Matter that live out the ideals of targeted universalism to truly design for all.
- The Racial Healing Handbook is a great start to unpacking our own racial biases.
Run With It
We need to embed these discussions into our processes, or else they won’t happen. They must also happen on a team level. This work cannot happen in a silo with one or two individuals trying to carry the torch forward. Project Inkblot left us with some helpful tips on mapping our cultural defaults with our teams:
- Brainstorm cultural defaults with your team (“Whose experience or POV is this design decision based on?” “What are all of the cultural defaults present in the design of this product, service or content?”) using a whiteboard tool like Miro or Freehand during the ideation phase
- Allow patterns to emerge and cluster ideas into themes
- Have a thoughtful conversation about these themes and why they have emerged
- Start to think on what are low-hanging fruit strategies to get in front of these defaults. What needs to shift?
- Make sure your strategy addresses the root causes of these cultural defaults. For example, if you are designing a hiring strategy, a root cause question is “what it is about our work culture that has Black people leave at a higher rate than white folks?” as opposed to “how can we hire more Black people?”
We’re beyond grateful to Project Inkblot for sharing their framework with us and pushing us to critically think about strategy in new ways. As the gatekeepers of creative work, we have a responsibility to design against racism as the cultural default and create equity in the work that feeds into the cultural fabric of our country. We invite you to join us on that mission.
