A Design Thinker Reckons with Design Thinking
Part 1 of the Series “Design for Liberation”
By Tania Anaissie, Founder of Beytna Design
Intro
Design Thinking has been revered as a Silver Bullet of sorts — a methodology that never met a problem it couldn’t solve. But since my early days as a design student, I’ve had serious misgivings about the harm it perpetuates. My lived experience allowed me to see gaps in the process that largely went unnoticed. Still a practitioner today, I want to share my journey of dismantling and reassembling Design Thinking to act in service of liberation. I will walk you through my critiques of Design: that it exacerbates power asymmetries, that it pretends to be apolitical, that it ignores the complexity of systems, and that it does not hold designers accountable for the impact of their work. Design Thinking was shaped to increase consumption and profit in the corporate world. Its copy-paste transition into the social sector has left a deep legacy of harm, part of which I perpetuated in my early practice. Our field is at a moment of reckoning, the beginning of a new era, and we can either choose to maintain the status quo, harming the communities we seek to support, or we can transform our practice to align to liberation values.
So why write this critique? And why now, a decade into my Design Thinking practice? The short answer is I think more people are willing to listen. The pandemic showed us our systems are more flexible than we were led to believe. As we watched our families pass to this virus — especially our elders of color — it amplified ongoing activism which had long been questioning systems that create health inequity, oppression, and poverty. The murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery (and countless others before them) brought thousands together to catalyze another modern reckoning with systems of White Supremacy, state-sanctioned violence, and exploitative capitalism. These changes created what Mario Lugay calls political openings — opportunities to catalyze change and collectively move to a higher level of consciousness.
Amidst all of this, there was a huge outpouring of interest in a field I’ve been immersed in my entire career — Design Thinking. Design Thinkers were eager to volunteer and apply their methodology to these complex challenges. Last fall, IDEO suggested Design Thinking could help us redesign capitalism itself. I’m heartened to see that there’s so much interest in this discipline, but I’m also deeply aware of its weaknesses and imperfections. If leaders are turning to Design Thinking for solutions, we should take a hard look at the harm it perpetuates through its shortcomings.
My hope is to join a conversation about our field and validate others who have similar doubts about a methodology that for many years seemed beyond criticism. I offer this critique not to discredit Design Thinking’s value or argue for its obsolescence but instead to hold a field that I love and still practice responsible for its shortcomings. As Victor Cary says, “the first step towards change is to question the status quo.”
How I Got Here
I was first drawn to Design Thinking as a design student in college. Design classes were a place where I could experiment and release expectations of perfection. My lived experiences as a daughter of war-fleeing immigrants and an Arab-American became assets in my design practice. My ability to code-switch, to empathize across cultures, and to look for solutions even in constrained environments allowed me to thrive.
But early in my studies, I had questions about the ethics of our practice. The framing that designers were more insightful, more creative, and more capable of solving problems communities faced was in deep tension with the wisdom, creativity, and organizing power I saw in communities I came from. I felt the teachings were geared at facilitating profit for companies over what was best for their customers or society.
In the program, we occasionally heard from guest speakers who spoke about how design could be used for social good. I was so eager for more, but I was one of about four students in my class interested in Design Thinking for its social change potential. So with four peers, I co-founded our university’s Design for America chapter. This was a place where we could work on social change projects in the local community outside of class time. It became my outlet to explore design’s social change potential and its unresolved shortcomings.
Why Me?
I am the product of what I am critiquing, and my ability to be a critical thinker has been impacted by the place I learned it from. My goal is to give back, and as harsh as critiques can feel, I am practicing what my field taught me, to question and redesign when something becomes outdated. I hope it can be received in the spirit of love in which I am writing it.
Another reason I’m writing this is to come clean in a way. Though I’ve had doubts about the ethics of the practice from the start, I did not always have the courage to validate my own fears, instead thinking, “they’ve been at this a long time, they must know something I don’t.” In my own practice, I perpetuated harm both out of fear but also out of an inability to see the depths of Design Thinking’s shortcomings until I was in the field with partners. I want to bear witness to my own errors to hold myself accountable to continue practicing differently and to hopefully prevent others from repeating my mistakes.
Entering the Workforce
My misgivings with the field only intensified when I graduated, worked at a design firm, and later returned to teach and work at a renowned Design Thinking institute. At the time, I was on a personal political journey to understand how systems of oppression impacted my life, which intensified my desire to pursue these tensions in our practice. As I was crafting my design politics, I was sent to Cape Town South Africa to offer a free Design Thinking training to our university’s students studying abroad and local learners who wished to sign up.
This trip became an explosive affirmation of my misgivings about our field. First, locals questioned our presence. Who were we, as this U.S.-based university, to show up uninvited, mirroring colonial histories, to come and spread our “wisdom” of Design Thinking to locals, many of whom were active practitioners? Cape Town was still haunted by the legacy of being the 2014 World Design Capital. Hundreds of designers, many White, flooded into townships to interview communities about their concerns and challenges, only to vanish after the half-day workshop and never return. It became so pervasive that community members could plan their days and meals around these workshops. This and the legacy of harmful research and “social impact” projects wielded by starry-eyed Westerners created mistrust amongst communities we encountered.
Local residents often said things like, “Oh you’re a designer? We know all about you, and we’re not interested,” and “you’re not welcome here.”
Students in our workshop interrupted vendors for interviews using a common Design Thinking workshop practice called “intercept interviews.” One worker said, “You’re making me feel like a slave.” These vendors felt uncomfortable devoting time to design students while under their boss’ supervision, and the experience left workshop participants critical of Design Thinking. Within minutes of being on the ground, I was painfully aware of how I was complicit in creating this harm. I pivoted the focus of the trip and reached out to local designers humbly hoping any would be willing to share their critiques and experience (which they were, thank you). The power and courage of these communities to call out the harmful impacts of design validated years of doubt I had been suppressing, and I will forever be grateful to them.
I returned to work, validated and fiercely dedicated to how to prevent this kind of extraction from happening again. I spoke with anyone who would listen. I found one ally who connected me to a community outside of the university and the Silicon Valley design world. I went on to leave the university, co-create Liberatory Design, become an Organizing Committee member of the Equity Design Collaborative, and found my own Liberatory Design studio, Beytna Design.
With collaborators, we took Design Thinking down to its studs. Questioning every piece and while rebuilding it — only keeping the parts we felt would help us create liberatory change and work emergently in systems of oppression. I became obsessed with the question of how to leverage design for liberation. First, I needed to break down how I thought design was perpetuating injustice so that I could pinpoint where to start redesigning Design Thinking. Here’s what I identified.
Design Thinking Exacerbates Power Asymmetries
A year after leaving my role at the design institute, I was hired as a contractor by a social impact design firm to work on an incarceration and re-entry project in northern California. I was asked to interview men incarcerated in a county jail. We were not granted access to enter the jail, so the design lead suggested we meet detainees upon their release in the lobby to ask for interviews. Having had a brother who was formerly incarcerated, this idea made me deeply uncomfortable. How could we ask people who have suffered immense trauma to sit down with us for an interview to relive it mere seconds after they regain freedom?
Many were distraught upon release. They realized family members had not come to pick them up or that they didn’t have enough money to afford bus fare to get home. One man, in tears, asked the nonprofit volunteer standing next to us if we would pray with him. I felt sick. The design lead kept asking why I wasn’t walking up to them to do interviews, and I made up an excuse. I did eventually interview one social worker in the lobby but even that felt intrusive. I eventually phased out of the project, but the legacy of this harm haunts me and fueled my passion to redesign empathy practices in my work and research trauma-informed practices. This experience revealed a fundamental weakness of Design Thinking. It creates a vast power divide between the “designers” and those most impacted by the problem.
Designers hold immense power over the process and outcomes of the work and yet our lives are rarely directly impacted by the challenge.
In design education, we’re told, “people don’t know what they want, you have to tell them what they want.” I was taught to extract emotions and information, aka “insights” or as they’re often called “nuggets,” from people’s lives and to engage in “story mining.”
We ultimately get to leave and are not impacted by the results of our designs. So how do we rethink this transactional sharing of information and hold ourselves accountable to action after community members invite us into their lives? And how are we honoring and seeking to learn with folks who started this work before us?
Even after a project ends, we get credit for the outcomes of the work fiscally and reputationally, yet a successful process depends entirely on those we interview. We claim the project is to make their lives better, but how often is that really the case? And by whose standards? Design Thinking’s default stance is to design “for” people and not “with” or “by” them. We need to challenge our savior complex, and instead view those with lived experience for who they are: experts capable of co-designing with us or without us. We are discrediting the legacy of creativity that oppressed communities used for generations to survive in systems that want to erase them. They have immense value to offer, so why aren’t they in the room when we make decisions? What if we resurface trauma during interviews but don’t create spaces for rest and healing? What if we’re the tenth researcher/designer to come through their town and ask these very questions?
I offer a quote from an Aboriginal activists group from Queensland in the 1970s, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting time. But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together.”
Design Thinkers Assume Their Work Can be Apolitical
Juul, the e-cigarette company, was started by two alumni of a renowned Silicon Valley design program. In the co-founders’ thesis presentation for their graduate program they said they were interested in “designing for social change.” The original goal was to, “limit the ‘offensiveness’ of traditional smoking for both the smoker and those around them,” (Washington Post) and build on the “delight” of the smoking experience. As Juul raised millions of dollars and was lauded as a Silicon Valley darling, the university celebrated their success and the fact that Design Thinking helped them achieve this. As pointed out by George Aye, they had applied the Design Thinking methodology perfectly as they had been trained. Yet, their products created a public health crisis. Their addictive products (the ultimate business model), have led to the highest teen smoking rates in twenty years, and teen use has more than doubled between the years 2018 and 2019 alone. It’s hard not to take this personally as an alumnus of this design program and as a human, as I just lost an aunt last month to a smoking-induced cancer. What were Juul’s politics?
Perhaps their $38 billion valuation is how they lost their way. Profits, investors, and capitalism demand growth, massive profit margins, and new customers. Creating addictive products will fulfill all those needs. Why did the founders choose the politics of profit over people? They are not alone. The #TechWontBuildIt movement, made up of skilled workers in the tech industry, pushes back on employers who are making similar ethically questionable decisions such as designing products for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or for use by the U.S. military. We can no longer afford to pretend we are apolitical or neutral because our design decisions are always harming or helping.
There is a sub field of design called “Design for Social Impact” but I would argue all design has social impact. Whether the impact is liberating or oppressive depends on our values and how we enact them.
Without deep self and systems-awareness, we often reproduce the same systems of oppression regardless of our intent.
If our goal is to support humanity, I argue that is social justice work. Sometimes the reaction I get is, “that makes sense for a project related to racism or something.” But the reality is it’s impossible for any project to be untouched by the intersecting racism, sexism, ableism, etc. Objectivity in design is only a mirage. In fact, it’s a myth White Supremacy Culture has invested in upholding.
White Supremacy sustains itself by pretending to be apolitical and post-ideological. It creates default “truths” and views any challenge to them as “making things political.” It creates an illusion of objectivity through the idea of rationality. But white supremacy is itself political. The values that prop it up are the dehumanization of Blackness and Indigeneity, the control of those living in poverty, and the erasure of cultures and traditions. By designing for the status quo either actively or passively, we are reproducing injustice.
To design for liberation, it is not enough to have strong values. We must develop a lifelong commitment to self-awareness, humility, partnership, and decolonization of our minds and bodies. So what are your values, what change do you seek to see, what do you want to interrupt, what do you want to build? Are you willing to make the tough decisions when the time comes to live your values — to tell a client no, to extend a project deadline, to share power?
Design Thinking Operates without Systems Awareness
When teaching at the design institute, I was often conflicted about our course offerings. They were centered around social change topics like redesigning healthcare, food systems, and literacy development. But they all lacked an acknowledgement of the systemic implications of a world they were designing in. How can we redesign food systems without studying and designing around the oppressive control of undocumented farm workers? How can we reimagine health and wellness if we do not understand environmental racism, racial and class segregation, food deserts, body-shaming and objectification?
Design Thinking does not acknowledge the histories (and current manifestations) of oppression, marginalization, and control that created many of the social problems we aim to address through design. Nor does it honor our ancestor’s legacy of resistance to that marginalization. We cannot create authentic change without naming and understanding how these systems of oppression are intertwined in a project and without partnering with community leaders who are leading resistance to dismantle these systems. Design Thinking fails to name and dissect how things like systemic racism, ableism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. dictate how challenges emerge and how we must shape interventions.
We cannot dismantle a system unless we understand how it was designed (intentionally and unintentionally). When designing in the U.S., that means understanding how the status quo came to be — one that devalues our human, plant, and animal siblings in order to keep power in the hands of a handful of elites. If we don’t think about human behavior in the context of oppression and power, we incorrectly attribute fault to individuals. We end up reinforcing white supremacist beliefs when really we should focusing our attention on oppressive systems.
Humans do what we have to do to survive in broken systems, so if people are making decisions that you don’t understand or agree with, look to the system to understand how choices are tied to survival within that system.
Design Thinking can overly focus on narrow programs, experiences, and products without looking to the complex and/or randomly chaotic systems they operate in. What if instead we looked beyond symptoms and asked ourselves if we can launch a portfolio of experiments across the system and look at both long-term and short-term emergency support? When it is freezing outside and people are forced to sleep on the streets, we need both to find immediate solutions to get them through the night and also play the long-game to dismantle a system that allows the privileged to accumulate billions while leaving other residents of that same country without a safe home. Sometimes you can do it through designing with system stakeholders and sometimes you need to organize and put pressure on power holders to dismantle systems that refuse to acknowledge our humanity.
In learning to understand systems, we cannot operate alone. How can we learn from the legacies of fields like organizing, policy, philosophy, and systems engineering instead of re-inventing the wheel or assuming our modern practice of design and its toolkits suffice?
Design Thinkers are Not Exposed to the Consequences of Their Decisions
Another challenge of teaching design was the nature of project-based classes. While giving students real-life experience is deeply meaningful for their learning, it often is a source of harm for communities they step into. Built into the structure is a predetermined end date when students will drop the projects and have no responsibility beyond the duration of the course. It sets up a toxic working relationship and is like entering a relationship pre-determining you will break up in a month. Alissa Burkholder Murphy at our design institute interviewed teachers and students to uncover many stories of these conflicts. A group of students was working on a project to motivate people to sign up for organ donations. Their teaching team encouraged them to speak to what they called “extreme users,” so the students interviewed a man experiencing homelessness. It went horribly wrong, and the man thought the students were trying to harvest organs of people experiencing homelessness. Another group interviewed parents whose children were part of a free Head Start program. The parents received repeated requests for interviews by university researchers and felt pressured to say yes to these students because they worried their kids would lose their spot in the program if they said no.
A group of students doing a design project abroad, in Tanzania, was interviewing employees at a clinic. The supervisor of the clinic was upset to see them in the room and said, “I’m sick of young White researchers coming in and taking the time of clinicians and we never see anything come of it.” One student responded defensively and argued with the supervisor.
Design educators like Lesley-Ann Noel, Sasha Costanza-Chock, and Chris Rudd are leading with new models, but if the norm remains extractive, what are we teaching our design students about their obligation to Do No Harm and partner for the long term? In the words of organizer and designer Mario Lugay, we are wise to invest in the legacy, not just the short-term outcomes, of our work.
In the field, we prioritize “completing” a project but don’t think about or track the long-term impacts. What happens if it breaks? If the system changes and this solution no longer works?
Is the community reliant on us to return? This is exacerbated by the existence of Design Portfolios. Designers are incentivized to create flashy stories and slide decks for consumption by other designers, to get hired or accepted in higher education programs. The more dire the need, the more flashy the solution, and the more “wrapped up with a bow” the project seems, the better off you are. This creates unspoken expectations for what makes good design, and I’d argue it’s not defined by what’s good long-term for those living these social challenges.
I have met designers from the Philippines, South Africa, India and Ghana who have endless stories of designers parachuting in for one week to six month projects, stirring up the community for their cause then vanishing as abruptly as they arrived with no real change or often actually making things worse. For example, an American design firm built an affordable housing project in SouthEast Asia only to have the landlord evict their tenants and raise the rent for the beautifully redesigned units through a legal loophole. Similar to my experience in Cape Town, many communities are saying “no thanks,” to welcoming designers into their worlds.
Designers can also fail to take ownership for when we create harm. In my design education in Silicon Valley, these phrases were celebrated and taught to us: “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” This is the opposite of consent, enough said. “Fail fast, fail early.” What if someone can’t afford to fail? What if failure to a community means life or death? Design’s aloofness not only erodes relationships with those we wish to support, it perpetuates harm.
What would it look like instead to honor the agency and power of the communities we wish to partner with? Trauma is the absence of choice. What does it look like to embed choice as a core design principle in our practice? How can we avoid coercion, pressure, and the feeling that design is happening “to” or “on” someone instead of with or by them? At the root we must view community partners as true partners, not powerless victims but peers. How can we design invitations to honor choice and create avenues for communities to opt in or shut down the process?
Closing
This is a call to action for the field of Design Thinking and its practitioners. What are your politics and how will you shift your practice and teaching to instruments of liberation? These questions will continue to drive my practice until I retire. As a practitioner, teacher, and writer, I am dedicated to creating liberatory futures through design. Join me for the next piece in this series where I outline how I have changed my practice to address these critiques.
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Note: In the last year, the design program where I studied and the design institute where I worked have both invited me to share about my Liberatory Design work in their classes. I appreciate their openness to discussing these topics and love engaging with their students.
Thank you to Aaron Z. Lewis who edited this piece and was a fantastic thought partner. My thoughts are shaped by my experiences and also conversations with lovely humans and writings. I will attempt to name some of that lineage here. Thank you those in South Africa who shared their experiences: Dr. Keneilwe Munyai, Vikki du Preez, Trudy Meehan, and our workshop participants. Thank you to designers and thought leaders Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Sarah Fathallah, Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Sara Cantor, Mike Monteiro, George Aye, Chris Rudd, Mario Lugay, Elizabeth Woodson, Heather Tsavaris, Jennifer Hennesy, Kelly Ann McKercher, Arturo Escobar, and Denise Shanté Brown,and the communities of the Design Justice Network and all of my Equity Design Collaborative crew [alphabetically]: Antionette Carroll, Victor Cary, David Clifford, Dr. Pierce Edward Cornelius Otlhogile-Gordon, Erika Harano, Caroline Hill, Julia Kong, Julia Kramer, Tom Malarkey, Michelle Molitor, Dr. Christine Marie Ortiz, Brooke Staton, and Susie Wise.
Liberatory Design is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Tania Anaissie, David Clifford (@designschoolx), Susie Wise (@susiewise), and the National Equity Project [Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey]. #LiberatoryDesign
