DeepDesign

exploring human-centered design in context
ceda verbakel




contents 5 diving in
7 waves + blooms Capitalizing design Humanizing design Diversifying design
Popularizing design Questioning design Defending design Deepening design
17 human-centered habitats
Satsuko Van Antwerp Cheryl Hsu
Ovetta Sampson
Lisa Marie Chen Hannah du Plessis
39 drying off
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waves + blooms
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Diving in
If you’re a design novice or outsider who is equal parts curious and sceptical about the magic of design, then you’re in the right place. The pages to follow are broken up into two main parts.
The first is a broad-brushstroke history and theory of modern (western) design, spanning industrialization to what is known today as ‘design thinking’. This first section ends by briefly examining some of the arguments for and against this most recent, more generalized, design thinking framework. The second part is an ethnographic sampling of designers who do human- centered work in varied contexts – including their methods, beliefs and visions as they pertain to what Herbert Simon describes as “bringing about future states”.
In pulling back the curtain on some real-life designers in situ,
I hope to diversify and deepen your understanding of how (human-centered) design happens, and provide an antidote to the ambiguity that you may have already encountered in popular design education. Like yourself, I have also been unsure about what value shiny new design frontiers bring to the world, and
in the course of putting together this book I’ve grown closer to what makes design a special and worthy pursuit. I hope you find it useful too.
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THE SETUP waves + blooms


waves + blooms
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Capitalizing Design
Once upon a time the simple act of producing a functional thing was enough. Objects were complete so long as they served their purpose. Shirts had sleeves, stoves retained heat, and buckets didn’t leak. With the industrial revolution came machines that could make things, splitting the role of craftsperson in to two – the ‘unskilled’ machine operator and the (industrial) designer.
The automobile gave way to long-distance transportation of products, and with electricity came the ability to communicate and coordinate quickly across distance. And so, mass production, distribution and markets came to be. Newfangled electrical appliances made their way into homes, televisions beamed advertising direct to living rooms, and companies increasingly felt the need to stand out from the competition. Aspirational branding and aesthetic flourishes pushed some brands to the front of the pack, and usability was important to the extent that the product functioned as well as the next one, and perhaps, had some exciting (though mostly superfluous) features.
The term ‘human factors’ emerged in the mid-20th century to describe managerial efforts to scientifically optimise the physical, cognitive and emotional aspects of work, from the ergonomic layout of cockpits to the physical workflow of bricklaying. Environments were analysed and modified in the pursuit of productivity, efficiency, and safety. Differentiation between humans wasn’t the focus here – objects, environments and processes were designed mostly with the average able-bodied white adult male in mind.


Humanizing Design
The information age brought us invisibly-connected computers that would eventually fit in our pockets as smartphones. In the late 80s and early 90s, technology manufacturers mostly focused on computer functionality, but as computing became more personal, the value of design became more apparent. When Apple was floundering, Steve Jobs (with a generous financial injection from his frenemy Bill Gates) saved his company from the startup sinkhole with his eye-catchingly colourful iMacs in 1997. Jobs and his team continued to question basic assumptions like ‘phones have buttons’, and instead, let user research guide product strategy. The fact that Apple is now capable of selling 30,000 iPhones an hour is in part due to their emphasis on creating seamless and delightful user experiences.
Iteratively researching, testing and tweaking towards the ‘perfect fit’ between user and product is referred to in the design world
as user-centered design. The designers on software teams
who research user experience, mock up products and services, and test them before sending to engineers to build are called ‘interaction designers’ or ‘user experience designers’,, their goal being to optimise the experience of the user. These terms are most often associated with software because digital interfaces are ubiquitous, relatively easy to prototype and deploy, promise endless possibilities, and make money by reaching previously nonexistent markets through previously nonexistent mediums.
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waves + blooms
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Diversifying Design
The idea of focusing design choices around users is by no means exclusive to software design, technology, or even products. Parallel to the trend toward user-centeredness, designerly ways
of approaching problems are being applied to broader and more abstracted layers of interaction – services, communities, policies, strategies, cities, organisations, and systems of governance. All
of these less tangible environments include a multitude of social interactions that make up the ‘materials’ of design. The term ‘human-centred design’ stuck in broader contexts perhaps partly as a less instrumental-sounding substitute for user, and partly as a legitimately more appropriate framing outside of commercially- driven design.
Similarly, the trend toward human-centred design didn’t stop with superficial focus groups and usability testing. User research borrows heavily from ethnographic methods of interviewing, surveying, documenting and observing people in context,
to understand the nuances of their internal and external experiences. Some organisations and agencies, especially those that tackle slipperier social systems, now dedicate entire job descriptions to understanding how users out in the world think and feel, and translate that information into insights that drive strategic decisions. In many cases, design researchers describe their work as practising empathy, positioning themselves to advocate on behalf of users, or stakeholders, as part of the design process.
In less commercial contexts, sometimes stakeholders are invited to speak for themselves by actively participating in the research, definition, or ideation phases of design. More concretely, ‘participatory design’ might look like users collaboratively prioritising preferences on sticky notes, sketching their own journey maps, or mocking up prototypes of what a thing might look or feel like. ‘Co-design’ takes this a step further by involving users in the design process from start to finish, so that their preferences are integrated directly into a final design and its deployment. Participatory and co-design practices require designers to reframe their role more as facilitator or ‘process expert’, sharing ownership of the project and its outcomes with the people who will ultimately live with it.


Popularizing Design
This shift from ‘expert designer’ toward ‘facilitator’ overlaps with another significant wave in design’s evolution as a discipline. With an emphasis on empathy for users, reframing challenges, iterative prototyping, and flexible mindsets that can seamlessly slip between generative and convergent modes, ‘design thinking’ is, in essence, the translation of designerly approaches into a generalised skill set for tackling almost any challenge. It could
be described as an abstraction of the many and varied practices of designers, repackaged and communicated for non-designers. Most white collar workers have likely heard some hullabaloo about design thinking, if not already been exposed to some kind of design thinking training.
The popularity of this movement has been propelled by its sudden relevance in the world of business, due partly to its formidable market-engulfing success in tech, and partly to the economic crisis of 2008 that blindsided even the most cutting- edge corporate leaders. In the wake of the crisis, no one felt fully secure, and the need for more agile strategies that inextricably linked product development to the pulse of customer preferences, eclipsed the top-down, slow-moving, overanalysing approaches of management. And so, like an opportunistic algae bloom, design thinking theory and practice spread to conferences, handbooks, courses and boardrooms, promising survival via human-centered innovation in an otherwise erratic world. This shift transformed superficial perceptions of design from finishing flourishes on toasters or treadmills, to a strategic approach that questions whether an enterprise ought to be making toasters or treadmills at all.
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waves + blooms
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Questioning Design
The sudden popularity of design thinking has stirred up criticism both within and outside design. Despite disclaimers from its advocates about design thinking being intended as a useful framework rather than a prescriptive blueprint, it’s easy for both practitioners and participants of design thinking education
to neglect deeper consideration of what might be involved in retrofitting new approaches to particular contexts and existing work cultures. When shiny new ways of thinking and doing
are demonstrated to those whose current ways of working feel stagnant, design thinking facilitators (of mostly short-term learning experiences) report a magical moment when design thinking ‘clicks’ and even the most sceptical participants exclaim sincerely “we should do this every time we meet!” However, when disseminators of design thinking education forget to use these moments as an opportunity to qualify their message, the risk is unintentionally discrediting the value of legacy work cultures, and perpetuating the underestimation of what it takes to truly transition a system.
To be fair, drop-in consultants who offer a designerly tool or method are often invited by eager insiders who are certain it will be of value to the company, and who recognise that the training is just a peep into design thinking, and not a panacea. However, in order to convince people to purchase and partake in design thinking education there is an understandable temptation to side step making explicit its limits, and over-promise its impact to people who sign up with starry eyed hopes of big fast changes to come. In their defence, many proponents of design thinking likely understand the difference between selling an educational experience as a solution, and selling an educational experience
as the site of first exposure – a doorway to developing ways
of working that have the potential to bear deeper insights
and impact if pursued thoughtfully. With this as a basis for dissemination, design thinking moves away from over-hyped woo-woo, toward becoming a powerful democratizing tool for non-designers to meaningfully participate in the remaking of the world we live in.


Defending Design
Many designers have themselves expressed disapproval of an educational movement that appears to be diluting their expertise to enable mass export. Practitioners who have spent years, or decades developing technical skills and situational knowledge may feel cynical and perhaps defensive about the assumption that everyone is (or can be) a designer. Some might also worry that the buzz about design thinking leads non-designers
to perceive design thinking education as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, hiring, contracting, or consulting designers. Strategists, researchers and user experience designers already have a tough job making their case to potential clients, funders and employers. The value they bring is less tangible
than that of visual designers who produce beautiful things. The methods they use are more ambiguous, the embedded rigour is often invisible, and their tools for working are easy to misapply.
In which case, there might be good reason to argue that commodified design thinking is in direct competition with expert design skills. For example, when potential clients are looking for innovative user-centered ways of approaching a problem, they might choose a one-off facilitated ‘sprint’ over expensive outsourced expertise. When a user-centered design process is rushed like this, and a well-intentioned team employs rudimentary usability testing after foundational design choices have already been made, the value of the process is questionable and unconvincing. This is what Jon Kolko1 and others describe as ‘empathy lite’ – the underestimation of what it takes to meaningfully integrate interventions with the needs of humans that interact with(in) them. Kolko, however, doesn’t think we should do away with design thinking. Instead he believes that design thinking, when executed thoughtfully, legitimizes (and leads to) professional design work.
1 KKolko, Jon (2017), “The Divisiveness of Design Thinking”, in Interactions Magazine, XXV.3, May-June 2018.
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waves + blooms
Deepening design
These criticisms have forced defenders of design thinking to reflect on what it is exactly about design that can be reasonably packaged and passed on to bring value to its recipients. Even soft skills like problem reframing and cognitive flexibility require the kind of (situated) practice that a two-day intensive can’t necessarily deliver. It’s not a sexy selling point for design thinking, but ultimately, innovative, impactful, lasting work demands that teams expend collective effort reconfiguring their cognitive approaches, habits and cultures over time. Richard Buchanan hints at this challenge in 1992 when design thinking was only its fledgling stages. He writes, “the challenge is to to gain a deeper understanding of design thinking so that more cooperation and mutual benefit is possible between those who apply design thinking to remarkably different problems and subject matters”1.
A more recent and relatively under-acknowledged paper by design educator Lucy Kimbell rigorously and respectfully poses the right questions. “Without extensive comparative data, we may wonder how useful it is to generalize across design fields as different as, say, architecture and computer science”, and argues that perhaps there isn’t anything especially unique to which design as a generalised field can lay exclusive claim. However, if we focus on “situated, embodied material practices, rather than generalised “design thinking”, we may shift the conversation away from questions of individual cognition or organisational innovation. Instead, design becomes a set of routines that emerge in context.”2
Integrating designerly ways of working involves understanding how designerly work really gets done. In a sense, design work is as varied as the ecosystems on the ocean floor – there are levels of abstraction that support its translation to a beginner audience, like categorising specific kinds of creatures, but ultimately,
to really understand any particular part of the ocean requires inquiring into the ‘culture’ of that particular ecosystem – the unique creatures, their textures, their rituals and interconnected niches.
1 Buchanan, Richard. (1992) “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”. Design Issues. Vol. 8, No. 2, p 5-21.
2 Kimbell, Lucy. (2011) “Rethinking Design Thinking: Part I”. Design and Culture. Vol. 3, No. 3, p 285-306
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In order for workplaces to adopt new methods, mindsets, values, or practices, a cultural shift of some kind is required. Even
the smallest shifts are connected to bigger systems that resist change or snap back to status quo after momentary flux. In an organizational setting, these systems include the calendar an organisation keeps, the resources available (everything from financial support to post-its), the kinds of roles that are assumed, the meetings held, the leadership styles of people in power,
or even the jaded cummageons from middle management. Without consistent exposure and ongoing practice, new skills, mindsets, and habits fail to develop, and might in some cases be a distraction from current ways of working that have emerged and embedded in their own time.
The potential for designerly ways of thinking and doing to drive change is clear, but it is not necessarily the kind of cultural
shift that can be deployed to great effect without ongoing commitment from folks in context, situated curation of tools
or workflows, and also, guidance from practitioners who have embodied experience in process, implementation and production. In this sense, the act of creating and disseminating educational design thinking content is an act of design itself. Those involved in its proliferation will bring the most justice to democratized design by remaining reflective and transparent about the limits of theory and frameworks, and rigorous in their pursuit of serving the situated needs of their clients.
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human-centered habitats


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Satsuko Van Antwerp
Design Researcher for AI Software
I’m a Design Researcher for a AI software company. I do primary research (e.g. interviews, observation, usability testing) with the people who use/ will use our products – in order to make sure that what we build is useful and usable for the people we’re building them for. Basically, I get to learn in a deep and detailed way about people’s worlds that are really different from me, and then advocate on their behalf to my team. I collaborate with my team of applied research scientists and business strategists and we build products for our customers, but my ultimate client is the user of our products.


human-centered habitats tools & methods
Research Plan + Moderator Guide
The two most important tools for me are what keeps
my design work rigorous: (1) the research plan helps
frame what we aim to understand or uncover — and the outputs/deliverables from the research, so that people
are in agreement about what will be produced, and (2) the moderator guide, that walks through exactly how the [user research] session will be run, how things will be framed, and the topics or questions that will be covered.
Not having a research plan leads to chaos. Not having a moderator guide leads to potentially a) not framing the session appropriately to the participant, and b) not covering the necessary topics. Other tools I use include the iPhone voice memo app, Google docs to take notes, a small notebook for taking notes during observational research, and a 4K Video camera plus lightweight tripod for video tours.
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interview
Tell me about when your process or methods felt powerful?
Good (great!) design research requires rigour. There is a reason there is a process
to follow. Great design research requires a lot of pre-work before the actual data collection. And there needs to be enough time for analysis and insight formulation. Things go well when there is enough time scoped for these activities. I find once team members have experienced the magic of great design research, they are evangelists. The insights that it produces makes their work stronger, more convincing, less risky, more grounded, more persuasive, more compelling. Great design research leads to smarter/realistic/strategic decision making.
I feel like I learn this over and over. When I’m put on a project at the beginning and able to help scope and shape design activities at the beginning of the project, I can make sure that there is enough time to do all the steps well (prep, data collection, analysis, insight formulation, reporting) but often design activities get squished. Not because people don’t value design, but because they don’t realize how long this stuff takes! So being part of scoping conversations as well as taking the time to make sure everyone agrees on the research plan and brief is paramount to success, in my experience.
What makes a good designer or a good design process?
Curiosity. Learning mindset. An assumption that they don’t know everything. That there is still so much to learn from everyone they meet. A humility that they could be wrong. A desire to hear from others experience. A dedication to understanding the other.
Thoughtfulness. Critical thinking. Optimism. Generative. Can-do attitude. Unhampered by the constraints -- but rather, it draws the lines of the sandbox and clarifies the rules of the game -- in order to find the edges and push them. To explore and see what the boundaries are and when things break. How things work. Not taking things as they are. Wondering what else.
A make-things-concrete mindset, whether than means drawing or physically building something to make things clearer or writing things down for people to react to. Taking things out of the abstract words-in- people’s-heads into the physical world. It’s like when you describe the haircut you want to your hairdresser or you bring in a picture. You need to get on the same page. A good designer has a strong desire to get clear, to make real, to bring into the world.
human-centered habitats
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satsuko van antwerp artifact
In a welcoming future there is a toolkit related to community
“The welcome briefcase is filled with artifacts and objects, conversation prompts, games, and other items. These items can be set up in an environment to make it feel more cozy and set the mood — like a picture frame with an uplifting quote. Or the items may be used to flip peoples’ perspective and change the way they are framing a situation. It includes items to inspire and delight and to soothe. Objects hold meaning and power for people, this suitcase of object and artifacts changes the mood and atmosphere.
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Cheryl Hsu
Social Systems Designer + Researcher
I am a social systems designer and researcher. I design and facilitate spaces for collaboration in complex systems with lots of different stakeholders, such as health care, affordable housing, and sustainable food systems. Most importantly, I try to design situations where people are ready and willing to listen to the needs and desires of others whom they see as different. I am passionate about agonistic co-design, where people are able to explore tensions in differing beliefs in a generative manner that can lead towards more equitable and sustainable futures.


human-centered habitats
tools & methods
soft shoe shuffle
This is a facilitation tool to help reveal dissonance or difference in a non- confrontational way. You have everyone take their shoes off – this kind of humanizes the tones a bit – and stand together. When someone shares a strong statement (usually in response to a provocative question), everyone else
will either move closer or further away depending on how much they agree or not.
co-creation with ‘maketools’
I love bringing in low-fi crafts as a generative co-design or prototyping exercise to get people to think differently and work with their hands in a playful manner. There’s nothing more that I enjoy than a group of people who are given a play-based opportunity to transform their critiques of a problem space into potential solutions. It takes a moment for people
to get into it, but even the most stubborn bureaucrat can’t help but smile when they’re playing with pipe cleaners and fuzzy balls.
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human-centered habitats interview Tell me about when your process or methods felt powerful?
Something significant I’ve learned is that friction can be deeply generative, as long
as it is approached with deep respect and vulnerability. As a facilitator, it is easy and tempting to smooth over or avoid any form of conflict in a workshop or research session. However, I’ve seen the most success in environments where people are given the space to be frank and honest about their experiences, and most importantly, to feel heard, in order to move forward in productive co-design. I think as a designer, building spaces that can support participants in their capacity to work through ambiguous or difficult situations is an important skill I’m still trying to practice.
What makes a good designer or a good design process?
The willingness to go deep and to draw out people’s desires and values that underpin their behaviour and actions. This kind of awareness-based change demands a lot of reflexivity and internal processing, and can also be at times destabilizing when it requires the individual to contend with personal complicity in problematized systems. However, encouraging people to take off their “job” hats, and to be their full selves in the co-design process enables us to generate new practices and interventions towards futures that are in alignment with our values.
Also, I challenge any pretense of “neutrality” or “objectivity” in the designer or researcher! Design is always political and values-laden because as designers, we infuse our designs with a vision of a different and better world that we want to steward.
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cheryl hsu artifact
In a regenerative future there is a documentary title related to design.
“Design, when everything designs: When people and
the planet learned to co-design. This award-winning documentary follows the life of the anthro-arborologist who created the first dictionary of tree language, now an indispensable resource for every inter-species co-designer.
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Ovetta Sampson
Design Research Lead, IDEO
Job title aside, in my mind, my job is to collect and relay people’s stories to create paradigm shifts in favor of human-centered design. If people were inclined to be human-centered designers from the onset, my job wouldn’t exist. But the history of design has been to create tools, technology and processes first, and retrofit humans into them. I see my job as someone who helps people create a new paradigm where products, services and technology exists to augment and extend humanity, not take advantage of humanity’s fragility.


human-centered habitats
tools & methods
diverse voices
My most powerful tool as a design researcher is the sheer diversity of voices I can give a platform to influence design. When I’m recruiting for people to use in my design research studies I am dedicated to creating the most diverse pool of candidates I can get to showcase a diverse point of view. Yet, that diverse pool isn’t about the exoticness of difference, rather it’s to present a more complete picture of customers and product users. You can’t broaden one’s point of view without exposing them to a variety of voices.
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interview
Tell me about when your process or methods felt powerful?
My process feels powerful when I collaborate with smart, industrious, people who share my goal of a more human-centered world. My process stumbles when I have to bring people along who aren’t quite where they need to be when it comes to human- centered design.
Many people’s view of the world is myopic - their point of view is centered around experiences that may seem pretty vast to them but in the scheme of things is pretty narrow. A lot of these people with few diverse experiences tend to sit in a seat of power. It’s no coincidence that of the 16 companies on Fortune 500 list who reported demographic data - 80% of top executives are men and 72% are white men.
The other 484 didn’t report gender and racial backgrounds among their top executives but Forbes doesn’t think they are exempt from the white male trend at the top. Delve into the background of these C-suite folks and you see a pattern of MBA, Ivy League, privilege and largess. Many of these white men are clients of the company I work for.
I realize that in my job as a collector of stories to influence design who my audience really is. I realize I have to broaden their world view. To help them come to revelations about the products that create and the people for which they create them. To see beyond the market studies and the demographic research and to understand them as the humans they are. But I’m also conscious of giving people a voice, allowing them to speak to seats of power in ways that they can be understood. For to make a more human-centered world, we have to make it more equitable. To make the world more equitable we have to have people in the seat of power to see its inequities. So my process works well when I interweave the desire for an equitable world in with the desire for a more profitable one. The two are not mutually exclusive.
What makes a good designer or a good design process?
What is the definition of good? Are we talking skill set or mindset? For me it’s both. A good designer is one who understands that he or she is not the person for which they are designing. A good designer understand that at best she’s an interpreter, using her design skills to execute on another’s vision and at worst she’s a go-between people and what they really want and need. Good designers value humility because they understand the profound impact on another’s life they will have with their designs. In the vein a good design uses her skill set to evenolope a mindset that seeks to amplify the beauty of humanity with design while avoiding practices that exploit its fragility.
human-centered habitats
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ovetta sampson artifact
In an equitable future
there is a design community center related to change making.
“Tanya and Jim meet at the art studio. Ms. Santos and Bobby meet at school. Mrs. Bonneventure and Kelly meet just outside the grocery store. And all of them come together at the free to access Design Community Center to help each other tackle community projects.
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Lisa Marie Chen
Design Strategist, IBM
In my current role as a design strategist at IBM, I spend my days talking to customers about their experience, uncovering opportunities to feedback to our designer to help build better products. It’s an important link when it comes to innovation. That we aren’t simply creating technology for technology’s sake. We need to ensure that whatever we make helps to enhance the customer experience or solve an actual problem. I like to think of my role as one that sits at the intersection of design, research, and business strategy. Which means being able to communicate and help strengthen cross-team relationships is an essential part of the job.


human-centered habitats
tools & methods
archetypes
Another tool I like is using archetypes. This stems from my past career in advertising. When we look at brand personality or voice and tone in AI, it’s always interesting to get people to think of popular characters, famous figures from history, or even people they can describe in their social networks.
metaphor
Use relevant metaphors to identify needs and expectations. We know that when it comes to customer expectations, it’s the last best experience that becomes the expectation for the future. So when I am looking for needs I ask for examples from other areas in life.
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human-centered habitats interview Tell me about when your process or methods felt powerful?
We sometimes say that a designer’s currency is empathy, but I often struggle with empathy maps the rely too heavily on assumptions. Instead of making my team try to empathize with a target user, I get them to seek out an actual customer I find one of the most powerful approaches when it comes to design is to actually involve the user or target as early as possible. I run a number of client workshops at conferences and while some folks struggle with sketching and ideating on their own, I find one of the easiest to engage and receive valuable information, is to interview them on the spot to help articulate an idea or experience. Patience and flexibility to adapt an exercise for a participant has proven to yield some of the best outcomes from activities.
What makes a good designer or a good design process?
I believe what makes a good designer is their ability to understand the people they’re trying to design for. Empathy takes you only so far. But having the willingness, curiosity, and the genuine concern for those that you are designing for always yields better designs.
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lisa marie chen artifact
In a AI-assimilated future there is a tool
related to strategy.
“AI and machine learning will augment human intelligence, enhancing our potential to learn more about our businesses, our people, and our impact. This will become an essential part of strategic thinking. Ensuring that
we leverage technology to make better decisions and minimize the risk of making of bad ones.
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Hannah du Plessis
Facilitator + Principal, Fit Associates
I work with individuals or groups of people who would like to participate in creating a world that is equitable and life-sustaining. I create what we call “spaces of becoming” where groups can gain awareness of how they currently function and learn new skills and methods to shift how they think and work. Recent examples of our work include working with the board of a theatre company who wants to shift who they are so that they represent the diversity of the community they serve. Another example is working with a university in the south that was founded on confederate principles, who want to become a home for all people and races.


human-centered habitats tools & methods
prototyping with our bodies
Theatre methods are invaluable for me. One of the reasons our plans fail is that there is a disconnection between what we can envision and plan and what we are able to live. Just think about your new year’s resolutions and how quickly those aspirations are eclipsed by life’s realities. Theatre methods help people get into their bodies and be in the moment – the moment in which they can either default back into the known or step into the unknown. Theatre methods are a great way to for me to help people gain self- knowledge about the ways they show up, then explore for (try on) different ways to shift situations.
Dialogue facilitation methods are another one of my favorites. So much of what holds us back are our own perceptions, beliefs and distrust of each other. Dialogue methods can, among other things, help us shift our beliefs, repair ruptures, dream collectively.
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human-centered habitats interview Tell me about when your process or methods felt powerful?
Thinking and talking are good tools, but when we stay in our heads we can err toward the abstract. I employ embodied methods as much as I can to help us deepen our understanding, to help us move from head to heart and hands. For this group I asked an individual to create a “social sculpture” of the dynamics of the U.S. immigration system, using her fellow participants as her clay. As the daughter of two immigrants, this issue is something she deeply cares about. She started by asking our permission to take us “at face value.” That is, to pick us by the race we represent, not by the human she knows us to be.
She started by asking two people with brown skin to sit on the ground, then asked six white females to stand in rows behind the brown bodies on the floor. A white male was asked to head up this row. The men faced each other, not the people on the ground. Behind the second male, more white females stood in ranks. Three females that pass as white, but who are not, were asked to stand facing away from the sculpture, looking toward the wall. Everyone else was deemed to have immigrant status – they sat on the edge of the room, watching but not participating.
We all stood there, taking it in before we begin to debrief. The experience of the sculpture changed our conversation from an intellectual inquiry into the felt experience of the situation. “I feel guilty,” said a white woman. “I felt the safety of not facing the situation,” said another. “I felt powerless,” said an immigrant. “I felt isolated,” said a white-passing woman of color. “I felt misunderstood,” said a white male. “I felt abandoned,” said one of the brown-skinned women.
Together we discussed how this affects us and how we affect it. We participate in this system. Hearing how it affects people sparks empathy and a reverence for the world we walk in. Witnessing our own participation opens us to hard questions we need to ask and shows us how we might shift our role.
This exercise has worked really well. It also, once, did not. The time that this exercise did not go over well was when I did not (in facilitation jargon) “build a robust container,” and one participant said they felt traumatized by the exercise. As a facilitator I felt really badly for not building the container in a manner where each person felt they had the knowledge to navigate their own experience, the freedom to step out when it felt like too much, and some tools to calm their emotions. In talking to other facilitators, this is a risk of this type of work. You can do your best to lay a good foundation, but you can never know what is present in people’s interior lives.
What makes a good designer or a good design process?
So my lesson in “good social design” as it pertains to this moment is to: (1) Work at the speed of trust by taking time to build a trusting container (2) lean into discomfort and embrace what comes your way without collapsing into self-criticism or stepping out in defensiveness (3) listen to and learn from everyone’s experience.
After the event I asked all 24 participants to give me feedback and I was grateful to learn that for almost all of them it was a deep, opening and important experience. Not easy, but important. I was grateful that our engagement with this group lasted over several weeks. The participant who felt traumatized by the exercise showed up again and again and we could continue deep work in a way that everyone felt able to participate in.
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hannah du plessis artifact
In a post-oppression future there is a series of rituals related to change making.
“Coming in to right relationship: a conference series to transition to a life-affirming society. This conference is designed to make the invisible tangible. Power imbalances, hidden emotions, and different mental models or historical understandings can be named, surfaced and worked with so we can move forward together without it crippling the conversation.
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Drying off
Human-centered design practice is many and varied. Prototypes can look like wireframes, dialogues, sketches, embodied improv, or articulated visions. Tools and methods include spreadsheets, metaphors, craft supplies and taking-off-ones-shoes to shuffle around. Mediums for changemaking include services, algorithms, strategies and social systems.
In each of these contexts, cultures of design look very different, and I recommend in your own exploration to pay attention
to those differences, to wonder why and how they show up in that way, and to start practising ways of design thinking, doing and being that work for you. These ethnographic samples also tell a deeper story about what might make good design, and demonstrate to novices that the most impactful design work is unglamorous, unassuming and labour intensive.
Of course, understanding design is still not enough, and reading this boo, or any book, won’t provide everything you need to do excellent design. For that, you need to have done design. To have spent time and effort cultivating methods specific to context, developing habits that nurture collaboration, learning to spot moments that call for reframing problems, becoming sensitive and intentional about cognitive shifts, understanding what it takes to really listen, and practising, over and over again, the specific skills (and thrill) of making real stuff (happen).
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Appendix |The following artifact was sent to designers who work in human- centered roles as a tool to draw out their perspectives, stories and visions for design.
Deepening & Diversifying Design
About
I’m producing a book that features diverse* people who do compelling design work, or
design-like work. It will be a written and visual ethnographic exploration of their thoughts, methods, beliefs and imagined futures. At the least, I hope my book diversifies and deepens the readers understanding of the kinds of approaches, methods and tools that might be used to bring about future states, and showcase perspectives from people who don’t fit the usual white-man-wearing-spectacles-and-eccentric-socks demographic. At most, I hope my book can serve as a peep into, or a nudge towards, the kinds of futures I would like to see in and around the world of design.
*The book likely won’t explicitly be about diversity – but will just *happen* to showcase diverse people in its content.
Context + Credits
As part of my MA in Design at Carnegie Mellon, I’m taking a class where we have unpacked and critiqued ‘Design Thinking’. I understand design thinking as an abstracted template of an infinite variety of processes, tools and methods, that can rarely be deployed to great effect without some level of contextual embedding alongside folks who inhabit the system under question, curation of the tools or methods used to carry it out, and perhaps also, guidance from practitioners who have embodied process experience (eg. designers, facilitators).
This book is a response to a culminating project brief asking us to produce our own Design Thinking ‘manual’. My approach has been influenced by my reading of Ezio Manzini, Lucy Kimbell, Arturo Escobar, Adrienne Maree Brown and Donella Meadows. I have also been inspired by the format of Cory Silverberg’s puberty education books for kids, because like puberty, design is context dependent, difficult to explain to those who haven’t experienced it, and laden with values depending on how you explain it. Finally, one of the activities to follow is based on the card game The Thing From The Future by Situation Lab.
What to do
The questions + activity sheet to follow should take about 30 min, and involves some rough sketching – feel free to be quick and scrappy! Once finished, please email me (1) your answers to questions, (2) scans/photos of sketches, and (3) a high-res photo of yourself (ideally in your work context,
but an informal solo shot will work) by Sun 25th Nov.
Note: I’ve included in my email a rough design mock-up of a spread in the book to give you a sense of how the finished product *might* look.
Thank you & I’m looking forward to sharing the final product with you <3


Questions + Activity Sheet
Part 1: Questions (10 min)
Feel free to type these out or record your answers with a voice memo:
• In 3-5 sentences, please describe the kind of work do you do and it’s context(s)?
• Reflecting on your own process(es), please describe/sketch a scenario or moment when your process felt powerful, or your process felt like it was stumbling, or you learned something that stuck with you about the principles/process of “good” design
• Please describe/sketch/take photos of 2 or more tools, methods, habits, approaches, principles, or artifacts that have proved powerful in your own work.
• What do you think, if anything, makes a good designer or a good design process?
Part 2: Sketching things from the future of design (20 min)
This activity is about making your hopes about the future specific, concrete, and easily
communicable. Below is an incomplete sentence that, when completed, describes a ‘thing from the future’. Your tassk is to use your imagination to fill in the details, so that the ‘thing’ you describe and sketch tells a story about your preferred future of design.
1. Fill in the gaps to form a complete sentence
2. Use the complete sentence as a prompt to imagine a specific thing
3. Write a short description (1-2 sentences) of the thing you’re imagining, and draw a rough sketch. Don’t hesitate to add details!
4. Repeat until you have at least 2 sketches you’d like to share with me
20 YEARS FROM NOW, IN A _{future}_ FUTURE THERE IS A _{thing}_ RELATED TO
_{theme}_ {future}
Please come up with any word to describe your preferred future. Examples might include: diverse, experimental, sustainable, delightful, just, and so on.
{thing}
Please choose any of the following provided words: conference brochure, tool, ritual, organization, university department, headline, documentary title, device, job, poster, best seller, festival, award, public service announcement, game, map, flag
{theme}
Please choose any of the following provided words: design, design thinking, technology, user research, change making, urbanism, policy design, service design, interaction design, activism, social innovation, strategy, behavior change
You’re Done!


giant thanks to
Satsuko Van Antwerp Cheryl Hsu Ovetta Sampson Lisa Marie Chen Hannah du Plessis