Collaborative Designing Needs Racial Fluency
By: Hillary Carey
Tags: Participatory Design, Racism, Co Création, User Centered Design, Social Justice

I sometimes facilitate workshops or full projects that are primarily centered on the experiences of people of color. In my professional practice, I have contributed to several design projects delving into social issues. I have been in positions where I, as a white, cis-gendered, American-born design researcher, was interviewing, co-creating with, synthesizing, and sharing out the experiences of people of color. Yet there is cultural fluency around race that the participants of color might have that I did not. So I began a reflective practice of studying race, systemic oppression, intersectionality, and the “white fragility”[1] many white people have that too often prevents us from engaging with these topics.

My perspective before I began the reflective study was rooted in color-blind racism[2] — the all-too-common idea is that as long as I treat everyone with care, I, as a white woman, can connect and uncover insights and race doesn’t matter. If I am respectful and honest, I have the right tools to conduct this research. But I didn’t have the right tools. I did not know how to build trust with people who had been systemically marginalized for generations. I did not stay with the discomfort around race until stories emerged. I did not consider the history of extractive research conducted by white people. So, I didn’t build my research plan with that in mind.

When User Centered Design is applied without consideration to systemic issues, solutions can be narrow and short-term. One project I joined, with a not-for-profit organization as the client, helped me to see how ill-prepared I was. I joined a team of “design thinking experts” on a project for a community foundation, focused on understanding poverty and uncovering new opportunities in their local area. We walked into the project ready to apply standard tools to a complex project on inequity. The program directors at the foundation, with in-depth knowledge of their areas of focus (education, housing, immigration), pushed back against our naïve application of design thinking. It was frustrating and surprising. But after my resistance faded, I learned a great deal from their holistic, systemic perspectives. The research participants, living in poverty, deserved to be approached with tools and methods to protect them from, and reverse, years of subjugating research. Giving up control of the process to the people in the foundation who had studied structural systems of oppression was my first lesson on this journey toward justice-centered design approaches.

Design & Design Research

The fields of design and design research have been historically populated by white practitioners within institutions primarily situated in historically white-dominated traditions. Therefore, it is not always possible to find practitioners of color to lead projects that involve non-white participants. Lack of diversity is a loss to the field because there is much to be learned from people who have had different experiences navigating systems and structures. However, the work I want to focus on here is how to prepare researchers of all backgrounds, but especially white people from the Global North, to be more adept at seeing, hearing, understanding, and acting on the effects of race and racism in contemporary society. So that we can see a more holistic picture of all social systems we explore in our work and do so with care.

As design moves from the workplace into community contexts to contribute to significant social challenges, we must develop an aptitude in issues of structural inequity. Bonilla-Silva describes these structures as “the particular social, economic, political, social control, and ideological mechanisms responsible for the reproduction of racial privilege in a society.”[3] These structures insulate white people from seeing race as an influence and teach us to avoid talking about it. Robin DiAngelo describes this as “white fragility” in her book of that title.[4] She observes that people of color, in turn, have learned not to talk about the harms of racism with white people because too often, white people crumble at any feelings of guilt that arise. Similarly, multicultural counseling experts Sue et al. describe the barrier this way, “Issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability seem to touch hot buttons in all of us because they bring to light issues of oppression and the unpleasantness of personal biases.”[5] We, therefore, continue to brush aside these topics, “As a result, race becomes less salient and allows us to avoid addressing problems of racial prejudice, racial discrimination, and systemic racial oppression.”[6] Because design is situated within these typically insulating contexts, designers for social good have to do additional work to overcome our blind spots.

I will share approaches for leading co-design sessions in a way that is ethical, open, and harm-reducing informed by an awareness of structural racism. Designers involved with social issues should overcome the learned discomfort in talking about race and racism, to understand the full context of challenges that most often have a history in structural, purposeful inequality. Sue et al. describe developing that sensitivity and wisdom as work that is “an active, developmental, and ongoing process that is aspirational rather than achieved.”[7] Cultural competence is required when working alongside communities who are at the center of complex problems.

Collaborative Community Projects

Collaborative projects are places where we can empower, and we can harm. The nature of participatory design approaches gives voice and decision-making power to traditionally marginalized people. But it also may put white designers in positions of power to dominate research processes, ignore important stories, and continue habits of extracting and abandoning communities of color. Community-based projects have too often extracted value from local people and then moved on when funding ended, leaving participants with nothing for their hard work. Scientific and academic research has a history of subjugating people of color. So, a distrust of “helpers” who offer to come in and solve local problems is deserved.[8]

In the Participatory Design literature much work has been done to mitigate certain forms of power imbalance between researchers and participants, but very rarely are issues of race or identity ever addressed. Light & Luckin attribute this to PD’s original focus on workplaces, rather than communities, “most overtly political texts within this field appeared when the main domain of computing was professional work, so there is little broader reflection on technological tools for social action or technology design.”[9] As a result, participatory methods haven’t yet addressed the dynamics of racial differences between researchers and participants. To illustrate this oversight, I note this paragraph from Participatory Design and ethics advocate, Michael J. Muller, in his chapter about the value of creating a “third space” to bridge difference:

Many researchers and practitioners in PD (but not all) are motivated in part by a belief in the value of democracy to civic, educational, and commercial settings — a value that can be seen in the strengthening of disempowered groups including workers, children, older adults, in the improvement of internal processes, and in the combination of diverse knowledges to make better services and products.[10] [emphasis mine]

Muller identifies a few crucial instances where power can play a role but does not acknowledge race, culture, class, gender, religion, or ability.

Racially Fluent Participatory Practices

Participatory techniques involve particularly intimate interactions between designers and non-designers. Lead researchers should be careful to mitigate the automatic power they have as leaders, and this is especially true if there are marginalized or vulnerable people involved. With an eye toward facilitating successful co-creation sessions that reduce harm and increase insight, I built a four-stage framework.

This framework proposes how designers might prepare to lead projects with racial fluency, drawn from my analysis of three topic areas: multicultural psychology, design for equity in education, and design for social justice. In multicultural psychology, Sue et al.’s classic textbook, Counseling the Culturally Diverse,[11] provides a wealth of insight into interpersonal interactions across differences, along with Ratts et al.’s two extension pieces from the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development.[12][13] Then, at the intersections of design, equity, and education, I learn from Christine Marie Ortiz Guzman’s capstone from Harvard University: equityXdesign,[14] which modifies a Design Thinking process to fit public education contexts. Finally, I review two pieces from FutureLab in the United Kingdom (now part of the National Foundation for Education Research) on designing educational technology: Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning[15] and Handbook for Design for Social Innovation.[16] Both contribute tactical ways to bring equity into collaborative projects. These three areas of investigation help to expand my awareness of how racism might show up in deeply collaborative settings and offer specific advice on bridging across difference with wisdom. My synthesis of this work is reflected in the table below.

Conclusion

My intention with this paper is to contribute to the small but growing field of design for equity. I have drawn inspiration from literature from multicultural psychology, equity by design, and design for social justice. These authors offer ways to foster deeper, healthier collaborations in socially diverse settings and inform the table above. The framework represented in the table recommends a path for designers and design researchers to build the mindset, posture, and abilities to conduct co-creation, collaborative projects across difference. If we continue to ignore the role of race in our projects and their contexts, we may miss key opportunities for change. I will continue to practice and reflect on the value of applying tools and mindsets to the formation of participatory design activities. I hope that this work will foster greater awareness of the importance of designing with care for social dynamics.