The last post in the Design For Equity series was meant to be a conclusion, but of course it is also a beginning. We’d like to use this final essay to reflect on who we are as a group and what this work means to us, and more importantly, provide you with some ideas and insights about how to move these discussions forward and work towards more equitable design practices.

Collaboration Is Not Easy
We are a group of peer practitioners who knew each other from years of shared interests in the broader field of public interest design, and as explained in the first essay in this series, we came together to address a certain critique of the status quo of our field. This series enabled us to articulate a platform that has strengthened our resolve to work towards more equitable design practices, both individually and collaboratively. We hope to promote others to do the same, but as Jess Zimbabwe points out in her article on trans-disciplinary thinking, collaboration is not easy. She explains that for actual collaboration, “practitioners need not only in-depth knowledge and know-how of the disciplines involved but skills in moderation, mediation, adult learning, and transfer of knowledge.”

Furthermore, Jess emphasized the importance of recognizing that collaboration is the most powerful and pervasive resource for our field. When you think about your own accomplishments, think about all the people who helped in your success. Think about all the different skillsets they have and how critical your collaboration with them was to the success of those projects. Try making a list of all the people you have collaborated with. My guess is that your list gets longer and longer the more you think about all the different people who have contributed to your work in one way or another, directly or indirectly. This is because all meaningful work happens through collaboration.

This reflects a larger insight our group has come to – by growing our awareness of the nuanced qualities of collaboration, and simply by paying attention to the qualities of our relationships, we can give rise to a more network-based field that can move beyond the limitations of traditional hierarchical structures. This can help us create a field of social impact design that not only fuels a diversity of voices, but also embraces accountability – another recurring theme throughout this series.

Accountability in Process and Practice
In Christine and Liz’s article on the language of equity, they brought to light why we must hold ourselves accountable to incorporating design for equity into all aspects of our practice.

“The focus on equity makes clear that our projects are not ‘good’ just because we are bringing design to communities that have not had access to it. Our work should also strive to create greater equity in society and to eradicate the barriers that prevent some from accessing resources…This has implications for a broad range of factors, including how we engage with communities we are not a part of, how we treat our own employees, how we share credit for our work, and how we measure impact.”

They also note that accountability doesn’t start with the projects, but with us. As community designers, language is not something that we often give much thought to, but concepts like privilege and power factor greatly into the outcomes of our work regardless of whether or not we choose to acknowledge them. The next time you embark on a project, reflect on the role that equity, power, and privilege are playing. What are the power dynamics of the context? How much privilege and influence do the various stakeholders have in the situation – from the person funding the project to the community members impacted? Don’t forget to include yourself in that matrix of power and privilege because you have the potential to play an important role as well. Ask yourself what would it take to bring equity to the design process?

Developing an action plan for your design team to hold itself accountable is a critical part of all of this. In Barbara and Liz’s article on linking intent to impact, they stressed the importance of an action plan that incorporates an outcomes based approach from the earliest stages of a project in order to hold ourselves accountable to equitable processes.

“To fully embrace outcomes in our work, we must also acknowledge that they can’t just be tacked on at the end of the design process. We know we shouldn’t wait until the end of the design process to start thinking about how a building can be energy efficient or made of sustainable materials. Thinking about and planning for equity outcomes is no different… a team can employ a developmental evaluation approach, wherein metrics evolve with a project as it is refined. This way the project team is empowered to iterate concepts for impact evaluation from the very beginning instead of being paralyzed by the notion of metrics at the end.”

How might you begin to incorporate these lessons into your work? First, talk to your project collaborators about working on a theory of change to determine the priority outputs and outcomes for the project (if you’re unfamiliar, +Acumen has a great free online intro course on theory of change.) Second, throughout the project, regularly evaluate your theory of change and assess your progress and revise your framework as needed to reflect what you’ve learned along the way.

Accountability is not only important in project outcomes and the creative process, but in the way we work and run our businesses as well. Christine and Jess address this head on in their article on incorporating equity outcomes into practice.

“It’s challenging to build and maintain a practice in the social impact design space. Addressing pipeline, diversity, staffing, and financial issues is a heavy load, but our work won’t really be design for equity until we take on these issues and make sure our own internal practices are consistent with our values and the larger social equity goals we are fighting for.”

Paying Attention
In the same way that we need to view our work though an equity lens in our professional practices, we also need to understand this on a personal level. A few weeks ago, I visited Theresa Hwang at the design center on Skid Row, where she has been facilitating “Our Skid Row” – an ongoing initiative that puts into action the civil rights framework she described in her essay in this series. We were surrounded by empowered visions; words, drawings, models, and diagrams of aspirations for the future of Skid Row generated by its own residents. We spoke about the Design For Equity series, and in particular we reflected on the points that Nicole Joslin raised in her piece exploring career pathways in social impact design.

Nicole brought to light the importance of mentorship in cultivating a more robust field of practitioners, which sparked an idea for us to develop a mentorship exercise. Inspired by the diagrams surrounding us, Theresa and I began to draw diagrams of our own. We drew out our ‘network of loving relations,’ a term used by Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Senge uses this phrase in connection to what he calls learning organizations – groups of people who are continually enhancing their creative capabilities through collaboration – which have been shown to be deeply influential in the for-profit and non-profit world alike.

We asked ourselves, who are the people who help us on our path, and perhaps more importantly, what are the qualities of those relationships? What makes them successful, or not? For example, I found that while there are many people who inspire me, there needed to be a high degree of reciprocity of engagement to warrant a place in my network of loving relations. I believe that if we pay close attention to the quality of our relationships with one another and work to strengthen them, we will be better able to develop pathways for diverse young practitioners and ultimately create a field as diverse as the communities we work with.

One of my primary takeaways from this series is about the act of simply paying attention. Paying attention to the quality of relationships, paying attention to the far-too-present structural inequalities in our field, and paying attention to the use and abuse of power. Paying attention is the most powerful place to begin, and the act of paying attention is a tool we all have at our disposal.

Endings, Beginnings and the Future
As this series on Design for Equity comes to an end, our team of collaborators has been thinking about what comes next. We have met many times over the past two years and now we want to invite you to join in the conversation. We took pains to create a level of trust that allowed for honest reflection and meaningful collaboration and we hope you will do the same. We found that while we couldn’t solve these systemic problems as individuals, we were able to have a larger impact by joining forces and investing in collaboration. We hope you will help us expand this conversation and mature it, and we hope it remains honest, relevant and self-reflective.

Instead of creating a new entity to push this work forward, we plan to infiltrate our own conferences and networks, and identify new ones to use as platforms for promoting Design for Equity as a concept. We hope that Design for Equity can become a stream of dialogue within practice that is enriched by every new contributor. The Design for Equity websitewill continue to evolve as well, so we hope you join us in that evolution.

This summer we will host discussions at several professional events, including the upcoming Design Futures Student Leadership Forum and the Association for Community Design Conference. For those of you in whom these values resonate, let’s work together to raise the bar.

Please visit our website – DesignforEquity.org – for more information and updates, and please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at info@designforequity.org.

- Katie Swenson, with Jess Zimbabwe, Barbara Brown Wilson, Liz Ogbu, Nicole Joslin, Theresa Hwang, Christine Gaspar, and Jess Garz

This article originally appeared on Impact Design Hub on April 15th, 2015

Over the last few weeks, we’ve introduced the idea of “design for equity” and described why it is an important framework for practitioners involved in community-engaged work. We have talked a lot about what it means to have a more equitable design process, from the words that we use to the power of communities in the process. With this essay, we’d like to add another element to that discussion: an outcomes-based approach to better linking the impact we seek to have with the impact that we actually have.

Design for equity means holding ourselves more accountable to the things that we create. To do that, it’s not enough for the output of our work to have good intentions and hopes for impact. It’s just as critical that we also evaluate the outcomes, or assessed impacts of the project, to see if those hopes were fulfilled.As earlier articles in this series have acknowledged, many of us entered this space with a desire to make a positive impact in communities in need. While this desire fuels our passion, how often do we take stock of the impacts of our work after the ribbon has been cut and the iconic photos have been taken? The unfortunate thing about many of our projects is not that they don’t often hit the mark, but that we don’t often know whether or not they have.

Our reasons for shying away from the spotlight of such an examination are understandable. Budgets are tight in many projects; and, to address outcomes often means engaging things that feel outside of our control. How do we influence what our client or end users do with a space after it’s in operation? How do we evaluate our impact on human – as opposed to just technical – systems? Luckily, there are some smart people thinking about how to bring accountability into design practices. For this essay, we talked with a few of them to offer guidance on impact evaluation in the built world.

Why do outcomes matter?
Outcomes-based frameworks have been mentioned often in recent years in a variety of disciplines, particularly health. Rupal Sanghvi, a public health expert and founder of HealthxDesign, says that while an outcomes-based framework is now part of the health lexicon, it wasn’t always so, particularly in medicine. Not long ago many doctors believed their primary role was at the patient-level and to provide treatment if needed, be it drugs or medical procedures. How their patients fared (compared to patients served by other doctors), and how their approach affected outcomes were not questions that were asked, even in such a scientific field. Over time, it became clear that drugs and procedures are merely tools. It is now increasingly common in medicine to not only consider the tool of intervention, but to also understand how those strategies affect the patient during and after treatment, how they intersect with the other realities of the patient’s life, and how these factors should influence future interventions and practices.

For designers, our tools for intervention can be the buildings, environments, and objects that we create. But like the doctors above, many of us think of those tools in a limited fashion. All too often we only think about the outputs rather than outcomes. Designing a grocery store to be built in a food desert has the potential to make an impact; but what happens if it’s too difficult for local residents to walk there because of the lack of sidewalks? Or if many of them can’t afford the produce because of their income level? We often think of societal issues such as health and poverty in terms of the access or services that our design must enable delivery of, rather than the human conditions that our work can help transform.

To fully embrace outcomes in our work, we must also acknowledge that it can’t just be tacked on at the end of the design process. We know we shouldn’t wait until the end of the design process to start thinking about how a building can be energy efficient or made of sustainable materials. Thinking about and planning for equity outcomes is no different and needs to be incorporated. Now let’s look at how to weave an outcomes-based framework into the design process.

It starts with specificity
Specificity is something that has come up consistently throughout this series. This is just as important when talking about outcomes, particularly since equity is a dynamic concept. Kiley Arroyo, executive director of the Cultural Strategies Council, believes that even figuring out what you’re going to measure requires an equitable process embedded with specifics. Identifying outcomes assumes you are trying to arrive at someplace better than where you start; yet we seldom ask whose voice is embedded in that vision of the future. This a critical point for outcome goals to be effective—they must be intentional and specific.

Kiley tells a story of visiting with a few design groups in Marseille, France who work with several different disenfranchised populations. Because there is no French word for “community” in the broad way we employ it, she couldn’t get away with generally defining the project or its goals as being “community-serving.” Instead, she had to be very specific about the groups the project was seeking to impact. Once she was specific that the project was to promote culture-driven economic development in a neighborhood populated by North African, Armenian, and Khmer families that had been historically ignored by national (or “legitimate”) cultural agencies, she could become more intentional as to how she engaged those groups, framed the project, and developed outcome goals to which she and the design groups could be held accountable.

Once it’s clear which group or groups a project is intended to impact, the next step in developing outcomes goals includes assessing two important, but often overlooked, factors: community capabilities and systemic inequities. By taking the time to understand a population’s existing capacities, partner institutions can be more responsive in designing an intervention that builds upon those assets in ways that can be leveraged by the community in the future. This can enable partner institutions to more meaningful engagement with the systems of inequity on more equal footing.

Forming partnerships with place-based or issue-focused groups like the Bronx River Alliance, highlighted in this previous article, can help use existing community actors to identify their group’s own social and environmental capabilities. Once partnerships are in place, a team can employ a developmental evaluation approach, wherein metrics evolve with a project as it is refined. This way the project team is empowered to iterate concepts for impact evaluation from the very beginning instead of being paralyzed by the notion of metrics at the end.

Projects should also aim to impact the root causes of inequities, not just slightly alter the environment in which systemic inequities are allowed to persist. For community-engaged design projects, this means that unless we’ve intentionally created a series of metrics linked to these more systemic outcomes, the major public benefit many projects can have on underserved communities will be limited at best. To develop a salient and authentically impactful intervention, the process requires forming strategic partnerships early on to bring in other disciplinary perspectives on how to identify and address systemic injustices.

Influencing the design 
Through HealthxDesign, Rupal often works as one of these strategic partners who brings a different disciplinary perspective. Coming from public health, she is well versed on issues of equity and disparities, which are important concepts and metrics within the profession’s disciplinary framework. Creating a healthier society means not only addressing differences in poor health among populations, but also addressing the root causes of poor health among entire communities and populations.

As Rupal and her colleagues aim to address disparities, they know that in order to be effective, they need to target geographies where poverty is spatially concentrated. Although designers have seldom been involved in these conversations, Rupal believes there are significant opportunities for design to inform health and social justice strategies.

Design can also be transformed by consideration of these strategies and related outcomes. Rupal tells the story of a design competition that she worked on with Interface Studio Architects (ISA), an architecture firm with which she frequently collaborates. ISA was shortlisted for a supportive housing development in Syracuse for a resident population that included formerly homeless, formerly incarcerated, and low income populations.

Once outcomes are integrated into the design process, it’s easier to think about evaluating success against those outcomes. Evaluation can validate whether assumptions about how the project’s impact on these communities were correct. This method is about providing a mechanism by which to learn and provide accountability to communities. It allows everyone involved to refine and scale the successful elements, and to learn from and adapt the unsuccessful ones. And whatever the outcome, knowing what worked and what didn’t is critical to strengthening future practice.

Thinking about outcomes at scale

Moving beyond good intentions
Too often design projects meant to improve communities only amount to good intentions. Worse, some also extract considerable goodwill, energy, time, and social capital from these underserved communities, but result in design products that are not impactful to the issues at hand. These communities are left with depreciating capacity to trust designers and increased reserves of well-earned angst. We doubt that’s an outcome that anyone desires.

If we truly want to design for equity, then we need to stop fearing accountability. Thoughtful understanding of the systemic issues that projects intend to address, along with specific metrics co-created between communities and design partners, can foster cultures of accountability and equitable levels of commitment on all sides. Strategic partnerships with other disciplines can contribute fresh approaches to developing outcomes and identifying new metrics that can potentially affect the systems perpetuating societal injustices. And being specific about intentions throughout the process can provide a roadmap to deeper impacts.

Outcomes-based design can be a catalyst for – not a barrier to – change. Let’s agree that the time has come for us to turn our own tools of intervention into opportunities for impact.

I once had the good fortune to have lunch with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi at a meeting for a group of politically active young women. To demonstrate why she was so committed to developing that group, she told us a story of a conversation that had taken place in a members’ lounge inside the U.S. Capitol Building.

A group of around a dozen Congressmen had started telling the stories of their children’s births. The stories focused on frantic drives to the hospital and rushed orders that the men had received from labor-and-delivery nurses in the hospital. Pelosi turned to the only two other Congresswomen in the room—the three had borne 10 children among them—and asked, “How long do you think it will take before any of them think to ask us about our experiences of childbirth?” The disappointing answer was that each of the men in the room took a turn in telling his (or his wife’s) story before any of them thought to ask the three people with first-hand experience in the room. This struck me as a perfect illustration of how someone’s lack of awareness on their limited perspective results in a failure to learn from those around them.

Framing the Problem(s)
Every professional discipline travels with its own baggage - specific terminology, ways of looking at the world, and preferred tools for solving a given problem. Advanced degrees, professional associations, and conferences all serve to further socialize members of that profession into its codes of jargon and collective ways of approaching the world. The advantage, then, of gathering experts from different disciplines around a table is the necessity for each individual to examine his or her own biases and redefine terminology to be meaningful and relevant for those unfamiliar with their profession’s jargon.Every professional discipline travels with its own baggage - specific terminology, ways of looking at the world, and preferred tools for solving a given problem. Advanced degrees, professional associations, and conferences all serve to further socialize members of that profession into its codes of jargon and collective ways of approaching the world. The advantage, then, of gathering experts from different disciplines around a table is the necessity for each individual to examine his or her own biases and redefine terminology to be meaningful and relevant for those unfamiliar with their profession’s jargon.

In recent years, a wide variety of professions have begun discussing the value of multidisciplinary teamwork in order to provide different perspectives on problems, create comprehensive definitions of problems, and develop the consensus that is necessary for a project or solution to proceed to implementation. The environmental design fields have a mixed history of crossing disciplinary boundaries. City planning emerged at the turn of the 20th century; landscape architecture organized itself as a profession at around the same time. Before then, architects were the only profession concerned with the built environment of the city. As the technical know-how required to practice in these fields expanded, it made sense that the disciplines would divide and conquer. But it takes hard work to keep all of this disparate expertise (not to mention that of other fields like economics, politics, art, sociology, and geography) working together to transcend natural disciplinary boundaries.

What follows are examples of why this thinking is critical.

Defining the Terms
The terms multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary are increasingly used to describe thinking across diverse fields of work, but the terms are ambiguously defined and used interchangeably. The Swedish environmental researcher Malin Mobjörk offers a useful description of the continuum of the three terms:

Multidisciplinarity refers to a number of disciplines investigating a specific problem from their respective perspectives. Investigations are made using each discipline’s ordinary tools. This approach has been described as ‘a side by side of disciplines.’

Interdisciplinarity implies a shared problem formulation and, at least to some extent, a common methodological framework for the investigation of the different themes. Cooperation exists between researchers from various disciplines involved in the process who develop a shared problem formulation.

Transdisciplinarity describes a practice that transgresses and transcends disciplinary boundaries, including the development of common language and novel or unique methodologies that integrate the fields and disciplines. The cross-fertilization of ideas yields both an expanded vision of the problem at hand and more imaginative solutions.

Why Aim to Transcend Disciplines?
When the very nature of a problem is under dispute, transdisciplinarity can help determine the most relevant present and anticipated problems. In the case of community design, this calls for a deep knowledge of the systems at play in development. Since the systems that perpetuate environmental injustices are complex, the solutions for them will be too. Successful solutions require knowledge from anthropology, architecture, economics, history, geography, real estate, sociology, and psychology. More inventive solutions will come from different conceptual, organizational, and geographic vantage points than any one discipline could create.

Transdisciplinarity arises when participating experts interact in an open discussion and dialogue, giving equal weight to each other’s perspectives and constantly relating them to each other. This is difficult because of the overwhelming amount of information involved paired with incompatibility of specialized terminology in each field of expertise. To excel under these conditions, practitioners need not only in-depth knowledge and know-how of the disciplines involved, but skills in moderation, mediation, adult learning, and transfer of knowledge.

A concrete example of transdisciplinary thinking in action is the field of “place identity”. Beginning in the 1970’s, a group of architects, planners, and urban designers worked closely with environmental psychologists and human geographers to significantly advance thinking about how individual people incorporate an understanding of place into their larger concepts of self. The concept of place-identity yielded a tradition of research on people’s experiences of the urban landscape, which has had a powerful impact on the ability to tell the stories of under-represented populations in urban areas.

The architectural historian Dolores Hayden —a noted scholar in the field of place-identity—writes about how certain identities are hidden in cities. In her book The Power of Place, she shows how privileged positions can obscure the narratives of racial, class, and gender minorities in cities. From places where dressmaker and cannery workers formed in the 1930s and 1940s to pre-World War II Japanese American business districts, she confronts each story’s bitter memories to show the perseverance of these marginalized communities. The outcome combines urban preservation, public history, and public art to recognize and celebrate American diversity in the everyday urban landscape.

Stakeholders among Disciplines
Starting from a position of recognizing that one’s own expertise may be insufficient for solving or even identifying a problem means that the transdisciplinary practitioner begins the day with three traits that are essential to good and equitable community engaged design practice:

1. A commitment to practicing modesty and humility
   
   
2. A sincere belief in the value of listening to others early and often in the process
   
   
3. Faith that the effort to incorporate another perspective has merit for its own sake
   
   

Because of these perspectives, the transdisciplinary practitioner sees collaboration with stakeholders as essential, just like collaboration with any other professional expertise. In such a way, transdisciplinary collaboration becomes uniquely capable of engaging with different ways of knowing the world, generating new knowledge, and helping stakeholders understand and incorporate the results or lessons learned by the research. A defining characteristic of a transdisciplinary approach is the inclusion of stakeholders in defining the project’s objectives.

Megan Sandel and Affordable Housing as a “Vaccine”
A prime example of the advocacy and organizing power that transdisciplinary thinking can have is the work of Megan Sandel, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. “Housing can act like a vaccine to provide multiple long-lasting benefits,” Sandel states. The use of terminology normally reserved for medical discussions in the conversation about affordable housing is a powerful turn of play for Sandel.

Sandel explains that children’s health is affected by the quality of shelter at many points along the continuum between homelessness and stable housing. For example, frequent moves increases risk of diabetes, insect and rodent pests lead to higher hospitalization rates, and lead and mold in substandard housing has long-term health effects. “Public health professionals no longer debate whether housing matters,” she said. “It’s how much housing matters" that’s the real debate

She has become an advocate for housing subsidies because they free up resources for other necessities such as food. A recent development showing signs of progress is the investment in low-income rental housing units for families in a dozen states by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest medical insurers.

In medicine, the benefits of vaccines are widely established. Sandel’s advocacy that a product from outside of her field (stable housing) can provide similar benefits to children’s health brings not only the opportunity to access health-focused funding into housing solutions, but a united front of advocates from many professional backgrounds arguing in support of housing.

Who speaks to WhomSandel, who is now sought as a speaker at conferences outside the pediatrics field, represents just one of dozens of bright innovators in other related fields who could turn community engaged design on its head. Last week in this blog post, Christine Gaspar and I wrote about the importance of paying for, or at least covering the travel costs of, conference speakers. By implementing a policy for covering speakers’ expenses, conferences can benefit from having more outside-your-own-discipline perspectives. The alternative is a world where only architects speak at architecture conferences and only planners at planning ones.

In the recent Community Engaged Design Leadership Equity Research Report for the Surdna Foundation, UT-Austin researchers Barbara Brown Wilson and Nicole Joslin, analyzed 34 individual conferences, trainings, and events in the community engaged design world. Through their research, one key insight was the demographics of the 439 individual speakers at these events. Among these speakers, the largest profession represented is architecture at 40%, with planners following behind with 27% representation. Many speakers had a multidisciplinary background in planning, architecture, and public policy. Those professions with very limited representation included practitioners trained in community organizing and development (4%), landscape architecture (3%), social enterprise or nonprofit management (1%), and business administration (1%).

If architectural professionals represent 40% of the “expert” speakers on community design, the wider field is bound to be driven by those demographics. The field of architecture has difficulty reflecting diversity in race, gender, class, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation of society at large. Maybe that’s okay if you’re running a high-end architecture firm or an elite architecture school, but if you consider yourself part of a movement that is trying to up-end entrenched power structures in the built environment, this demographic disparity should give you cause for concern.

Building Transdisciplinary Capacity
Short-term, project-based training modules can be helpful for alerting team members to the challenges and tensions often associated with transdisciplinary collaborations. They also raise team members’ awareness of their respective--and often divergent--disciplinary and professional perspectives; as well as alert them to the challenges and tensions commonly associated with transdisciplinary collaborations. Parsons now offers a two-year Masters Degree in Transdisciplinary Design, also known as “TransDesign,” that focuses on this kind of practice.

Do you practice using transdisciplinarity? Or do you know of other examples of projects, people or orgs that do? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Be sure to check back April 15th for the seventh feature article in this series –“Outcome-Based Design & Evaluation” by Barbara Brown Wilson and Liz Ogbu.

Image sources: Jess Zimbabwe, Urban Land Institute, Yale School of Architecture, Loeb Fellowship

This article originally appeared on Impact Design Hub on March 25th, 2015. 

Over the years, each of us has experienced or seen firsthand organizations practicing social impact design with the best of intentions, but with unsustainable and sometimes outright unethical practices towards their own staff and collaborators. Too often, the sense of urgency and the penny-pinching necessary to get projects done on limited budgets are used to justify poor organizational practices. But as the field matures, our working group believes it is critical to make these practices consistent with the larger push towards social equity.

In this post we have outlined a number of areas in which we think our field can do better, including the way we hire and recruit staff, the types of workplaces we foster, and how our financial practices sustain the work we do.

Diversifying the Field through Hiring and Onboarding
As previous posts in this series have mentioned, the social impact design field remains fairly homogeneous, with few people of color and many of the most recognized leaders in the field white men from backgrounds of opportunity. As in other fields, when challenged to do better in hiring practices, the response is often “we try, but it’s hard,” or “we just can’t find folks.” As the interest in the field among young designers sores, we believe that, as a field, we can all do better. Using other fields as examples, we can understand how to more effectively recruit a diverse range of people to the field.

In the legal profession, it is common for large firms to compete for top performing law students to be summer associates. Often being paid handsomely, these summer associates are also taken to expense account lunches and happy hours during their summers, with the hopes that they will form a rosy view of the firm and agree to sign on for the years of drudgery and long hours. The continuance of this trend leads us to believe that it must work, although we’ve certainly heard many complaints from the very summer associates that are being wooed. Obviously, most design firms, and especially those with even the slightest glean of a public interest focus, don’t have the recruiting budget to organize whole summers full of training and socializing without expecting those summer associates to contribute real hours towards billable projects. But there must be some middle-ground between the isolation many young designers feel in their early career jobs — picking up redlines or verifying zoning setbacks — and the manufactured glamour of legal summers. And perhaps it can be more meaningful than a simple happy hour?

Among the design world’s few parallel opportunities is McCall Design’s Summer Studio program offered to interns in the firm’s San Francisco office. McCall hires a group of interns each summer, and every intern gets the experience of working on a small retail project through all of its phases. At the same time as they contribute work to real, billable projects, the interns work in small teams within a studio seminar, exploring conceptual issues of urban planning in San Francisco.

If this high-end design firm with clients like “national and international retail and hospitality giants” can pull together an intellectually engaging summer for interns in parallel with billable work, shouldn’t the creative problem solvers of the social impact design world be able to do the same? Small design firms or nonprofit design centers might balk at this analogy, saying that they don’t have the luxury of hiring more than one or two interns each summer, or that even if they had such a group, no one on senior staff would have the time to devote to creating trainings or intellectual exercises for them. But what if a group of firms and nonprofits got together each summer and coordinated a summer studio, where each firm was responsible for one or two weeks of the training and team building and critical thinking exercises?

Another model worth examining is that of the public service fellowship. The social impact design world is familiar with the revered Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship, but several other non-design models exist: including the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs, the Skadden Fellowship in law, the Global Health Corps Fellowship, and the Venture for America Fellowship for entrepreneurs. Several of these programs include a rotating system of departmental or agency assignments, allowing fellows to experience work projects in several different settings. One such program, operated by the District of Columbia Human Resources Department is the Capital City Fellows program. This program affords recent recipients of graduate degrees in public administration or related fields to rotate through three six-month-long assignments in three distinct city agencies.

Law firms, large market-rate design firms, and big city governments have developed these programs because they need access to a top pool of young talent. Smaller design firms and non-profit organizations have a hard time making space to invest in attracting and grooming new talents for the community design world. But these programs also accrue benefits to their larger fields, beyond the immediate employer that a recent graduate signs with. What if there was a way for small firms and organizations to pool resources and offer new employees or interns some of the benefits of the programs described above?

The Association for Community Design (ACD) has recently launched a micro-fellowship aimed at advancing many of these goals. The selected fellow will spend two weeks working full time on special projects in an office under the supervision of a leader of ACD. It’s easy to see two weeks of paid work for one person as a mere drop in the bucket. However, an organization with the long-standing credentials in the field like ACD is bound to share lessons from the experience of raising the money, selecting the fellow, and supervising the work that could translate into better thinking for how the social impact design world builds a better, more equitable pipeline of skilled employees ready for the challenges of this work

Good Work Comes from Good Places To Work
One of the barriers to joining the field is the dismal employment practices that await young people in many social impact design organizations. Low or no pay makes it impossible for people with significant student loans or no support from home to enter the field. This not only limits the talent pool, but prevents us from better serving the broad range of communities within which we work.

We need to pay our staff. This is critical. A reliance on unpaid work means a field reliant on people of privilege to do the work. It will not be possible to achieve the larger goals of social equity in this field if we do not commit to paying our staff. As leaders in nonprofits and organizations that fund them, we have a deep understanding of limited resources. Salaries may start out low, and they are likely to remain lower than in other sectors, but it’s important they exist. But how can we work towards social change when our own internal practices are inhumane?

Models that rely on unpaid staff have high turnover and low accountability. People work hard, burn out, and move on. We lose all the knowledge they have built and then start over from scratch. This not only hurts our work, it hurts the communities we are serving, who bear the extended timelines and slow progress this engenders.

While we’re at it, we should pay our interns too. Nonprofits may not legally have to, but it’s still a good practice and critical to building the pipeline that brings folks into the field later on. When Christine Gaspar started working at the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), she drew on her own experience in college. She had watched friends from wealthier backgrounds take the most exciting — and always unpaid — internships. CUP now pays interns (with the exception of the occasional extern working for degree credit), and they have found this helps to draw a more diverse pool of people into the office, including people from lower income backgrounds and people of color. They have also found that this has created a pipeline for later hiring full-time staff who might not otherwise have applied to work with them.

A note on pro bono. Pro bono means “for the good,” not “for free.” In the field of law, for example, pro bono services are provided without charging the client, but not without paying the lawyer. The lawyer is still paid by the firm, as in many pro bono architecture practices, but the client benefits from free services. In the field, some have taken the practice to mean that no one is paid for the work. While there may be moments when this kind of support is appropriate, we cannot build a sustainable field on the expectation that this be the norm.

One of the unfortunate things that our field has ported over from the mainstream architecture and design professions is the sense of heroism in the work. We convince ourselves that we must work every hour of the day to make a difference. We have to answer that crucial weekend email, or… what? While our work is incredibly important to us and to the communities that benefit from it, we are not performing surgeries. This may be a calling for most of not all of us, and so we all push ourselves hard, but we need to make time for self-care so that we don’t burn out and ultimately leave the field. This is a huge problem in fields like community organizing, where the sense of urgency leads to worker burnout and a loss of skilled people in the field. The net result is not more work getting done. There is an ethical responsibility to treat our staffs humanely, but also to give ourselves the space of self-care, and to create workplace cultures where that is valued and not seen as laziness.

The heroic mindset doesn’t help us get work done in the field. Let’s leave the overnighters to architecture school and let our people go home. We have found that establishing a realistic work week, creating boundaries around weekend and night-time emailing, giving people sick leave and paid vacations and holidays, and encouraging them to use those days bears out what the research shows—more boundaries and time away from work lead to more productivity, not less.

Putting Your Money Where Your Values Are
Finances are sometimes seen as a necessary evil, but creating good, sustainable financial practices is important for organizations who want to contribute — and keep contributing for a long time — to the field. You can’t do good work if you’re not around to do it.

As a document that shows where you will get your money and where you will spend your money, a budget is not just financial plan, it’s an expression of an organization’s values. We know we all have fewer funds than we would like, but what do you prioritize in your budget? Do you include funds to pay for community members to give you feedback, or do you expect them to donate their time? Do you pay artists, designers, and other skilled collaborators?

It may feel like you have to skimp on these things due to limited funds. But even contributing small amounts of your project budget to these kinds of collaborators can show that you value them. As your budget grows, those items can grow as well, but if they are missing, it shows that you don’t value those contributions. Could you create your project without the community partners, without the designers? If they are key to your project, they should appear in your budget. When Public Architecture conducted extended interviews with day laborers to get input on the development of its Day Labor Station project, they hired the laborers for the day, allowing them to be part of the process without forgoing a day’s wages.

Similarly, is appropriate staff time included in the budget? We will never have enough money to pay our staffs appropriately if we don’t make that a priority in our budgets. Many of us try to fit too much work into too small a budget. While that seems like a good way to get more work done, it ultimately undermines our ability to do this work: we set our costs wrong, we can’t do the work for the amount we have, we can’t sustain our organizations, and instead of creating more work, we close our doors.

Finally, budgets are plans for how you will sustain your work. Is your budget realistic? Are you diversifying your funding sources? Are spending more than you’re bringing in? Does your funding come with too many strings attached? Are you shifting your programming to meet funder needs or finding funding that supports your priorities? It can feel like you have to respond to any opportunity, but budget decisions must be led by an organization’s values and priorities. Nonprofits large and small go under every day, leaving behind unfinished projects, unemployed staff, and unmet needs. A budget isn’t something to be feared, but a tool to help you plan for sustainability and long-term impact.


Designing Equitable Organizations

It’s challenging to build and maintain a practice in the social impact design space. Addressing pipeline, diversity, staffing, and financial issues is a heavy load, but our work won’t really be design for equity until we take on these issues and make sure our own internal practices are consistent with our values and the larger social equity goals we are fighting for. If we’re going to talk the talk, we as a field need to start walking the walk in our own organizational practices.

- Christine Gaspar and Jess Zimbabwe

This article originally appeared on Impact Design Hub on March 18th, 2015. 

The pursuit to challenge traditional notions about what designers do and who benefits from their work is not new. Whitney Young’s often quoted 1968 speech in which he admonished the architectural profession for its “thunderous silence” and “complete irrelevance” in the face of the civil rights movement also proclaimed a notion of hope in young people to rise to this challenge. Though much of the world has changed since 1968, Young’s faith in emerging designers to challenge the status quo still resonates.

Many entering built environment professions today have been armed with a vision of the design-expert whose distinct creativity and ingenuity will single-handedly transform the world one beautiful building at a time. The reality of practice quickly reveals the social, political, and cultural complexity of transforming our built environment in even the tiniest ways. This complexity is compounded wildly for those of us looking to practice what has been called public interest design, social impact design, or community design--the terminology for which still seems to come down to personal preference. The current climate of the field serves as an opportunity to challenge what it means to practice design and be a designer.

In our quest for impact-driven methods of practice we find that the heroic design-expert is of little use. The design challenges we face call for a more collective mode of practice and interdisciplinary view of design expertise. Those dreaming of a public interest design career today benefit from our predecessors’ work in expanding design practice into the domain of the community, but we also share the same burdens of pursuing a non-traditional career path and perpetually find ourselves outside of the traditional support systems our peers enjoy including clear trajectories to leadership, resource security and mentorship.

The typical avenues to this career path range from volunteer positions and temporary fellowships to existing small community design organizations to setting out on your own to start a new organization. Though these opportunities continue to grow, they remain out of reach for many who are unable to supplement their meager income, postpone benefits such as health insurance, saving for retirement, and job security, or just aren’t tapped into the networks to know such opportunities even exist. Even those of us who have had the privilege of accessing such opportunities (myself included) are often still left wondering what it all leads to. As enthusiasm for the public interest design field increasingly outnumbers the availability of these few sought-after positions, young professionals are seeking more diverse ways to gain a footing in its shifting landscape.

What is a “designer” anyway?
More and more young design professionals recognize a growing potential for impact by applying their skills in fields outside of what is traditionally considered “design”. They are finding their way through paths in education, program management, and international aid agencies, to name a few. This “dropout” has been a point of concern in the field of architecture as recently highlighted by the Missing 32% project, which in brief has brought awareness to the fact that many women leave the architectural profession within five years after graduation. With the evolution of more non-traditional pathways this dropout will likely continue until traditional notions of what it means to be a design practitioner catch up to the values young professionals hold today.

In a recent conversation with Kimberly Dowdell and Marcy Monroe, we spoke about the challenges of finding the value of design in our quest for a meaningful career. As a co-founder of the SEED Network and registered architect, Kimberly could solidly be considered “in” a design profession by all standards. Yet, in order to truly get at the impact she is looking to have she has forged into the world of real estate development and is working on a Masters of Public Administration at Harvard. This recent trajectory comes from Kimberly’s mission to be more strategic and focused on where her skills and experiences as a designer can have the most impact – which is not actually in the traditional notion of a design profession.

Likewise, Marcy Monroe recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a dual Masters in Architecture and City and Regional Planning, where she did extensive research on the role of the architect in disaster recovery around the world. She finds herself dancing between parallel professions and is struggling to identify where her experience, skills, and passions fit together. The path Marcy is pursuing could also very well be considered outside of what a design professional is seen to do by most demographic studies. To me, there is an inherent problem with how we identify “design professionals” if people like Kimberly and Marcy fall off the list.

Emerging professionals are also looking for ways to satisfy their desire for public interest practice without giving up on traditional design practices altogether. As corporate social responsibility considerations seep into the design professions there are growing opportunities for young professionals to do work they care about within the structure of traditional practice. Many of the behemoths in the architecture world are exploring their own version of a public interest design studio within their traditional models, such as Cannon Design’s Open Hand Studio, HOK Impact, and Perkins+WIll’s Social Responsibility Initiative. The potential for these modes of practice to trickle down to medium and smaller size firms could mean a drastic expansion of opportunities for young professionals to satisfy their public interest desires. However, the slower this trickle-down occurs the more we risk “losing” the passionate young professionals seeking ways to leverage their design talents for social impact.

But it’s not only the behemoths of the industry; many small and medium sized design firms are following suit and investing in research to identify opportunities for stakeholder involvement, social impact, and civic engagement to be a part of their design process. One example of this is my current work at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple under their 2014-2015 research fellowship. This annual fellowship is set up to infuse everyday practice with applied research on topics such as sustainability, resilience, community engagement, and health in the built environment. Through broad investigations and targeted deep dives, the fellowship allows a degree of experimentation for young designers to push the boundaries of traditional design practice.

Not surprisingly, I’ve found no easy answers to how community engagement can play a larger role in the design process. As Christine Gaspar and Liz Ogbu discussed in this post, this type of work is complicated by power dynamics, privilege and equity, which I continue to grapple with. Whether or not I find the “answer” I’m looking for is irrelevant to this discussion. The important thing is that firms like Eskew+Dumez+Ripple are interested in how the design process can influence and is influenced by factors outside of the traditional client-designer relationship.

What do we need now?
Growing concern for the relationship between designers and the communities they work in generates a need for more avenues to develop these relationships. As a field that values diversity and equity in its work, public interest design must also value the same principles in the opportunities its practitioners have available to them.

While people like Marcy Monroe, Kimberly Dowdell, and myself look for our place, we are increasingly discovering that being a designer isn’t quite enough to achieve our goals. As we struggle to imagine how our design skills can “work towards breaking down barriers and institutionalized injustice” as Theresa Hwang called for in this post, we also seek the networks of resources, mentors, and support to figure it all out. As emerging public interest practitioners work to build these networks, we find that the points where we stray the furthest from our “professional training” may very well be the points where we are figuring this out the most

Be sure to check back March 25th for the fifth feature article in this series – “Walking the Walk on Organizational Health” by Jess Garz, Jess Zimbabwe, and Christine Gaspar – and sign up for our newsletter!

[i] Whitney Young 1968 Speech to the AIA, Keynote address by the Executive Director of the National Urban League, http://www.designingactivism.com/2011/12/31/whitney-young-1968-speech-to-the-aia/

Community Design Can Design for Equity
In the late 1960s during the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, nonprofit community design centers emerged to facilitate the process of engaging people—particularly those that cannot otherwise access and/or afford professional design services—in the design of their homes and communities.

We need to revive the driving values of the 1960s to work towards breaking down barriers and institutionalized injustice, so that there is equal opportunity and benefit. As stated in the series introduction, working in the public interest is not enough; we need to design for equity.

Heroic Communities
The context of Community Design is often in low-income communities of color, where it is common that the designer is not from the community. As the second article in this series stated, this working relationship is inherently loaded with social baggage of privilege, race, and class. Designers need to acknowledge that we may never have experienced the “problem” we are trying to “solve” and that the community is the authentic expert on their issues. The community needs to be part of deciding the solutions that are designed in their communities. Designers need to recognize and respect the long-term civic infrastructure that exists within neighborhoods before and after design projects come along. With this in mind, designing in a civil rights context recognizes that communities should be able to create their own planning tables, not just be invited to tables set by others.

How Can Design Produce More Civil Rights Outcomes?
Community Design has largely been defined by engagement and participation. These two activities are key components to a more equitable process, but alone do not define a civil rights framework for design. To dig deeper into this question, I spoke candidly with Alexie Torres-Fleming, Executive Director of Access Strategies Fund, and Anne-Marie Lubenau, AIA, Director of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence.  Both women have participated in leadership roles that address the role of design within a framework of civil rights, and are redefining the relationship between the designer and the community.

We Live Here, We’re Experts, Too!
Alexie grew up in the South Bronx in the ‘60s and ‘70s when “the Bronx was burning”—a time when policies intentionally shrank populations and amenities were literally burned to the ground. Alexie was one of many leaders who took action from within the community. She was able to understand the learned oppressions of her neighborhood and actively engage, mobilize and fight for what was necessary for the equitable development of her community. By founding Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in 1994, Alexie worked to organize her neighborhood and support leadership development.

To build resilient community infrastructure and ensure residents of the South Bronx’s Soundview and Bruckner neighborhoods were actively participating in projects that would impact their community, Alexie co-founded the Bronx River Alliance in 2001. The Bronx River Alliance actively rallied for ways to develop their community instead of waiting for projects to finally come to their neighborhood.

One campaign and victory of the coalition that generated public investment into their neighborhood was transferring private- and publically-held open space along the Bronx River waterfront to be under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. With a plan to develop the space for public benefit rather than a new truck route that would induce environmental burdens in the neighborhood, NYC Parks proceeded with a traditional closed-door, top-down model of planning and design that excluded meaningful decision-making with the Bronx community whom originally spearheaded the effort to transform the site. As a result, the community partnered with the Pratt Center for Community Development, a trusted design team that understood the values of the community, to work with the neighbors and design their own community vision for revitalization. With these design resources as leverage and a place of negotiation, the South Bronx community fought for the implementation of their community plan. NYC Parks ultimately adopted some community suggestions like the concrete plant park.

The process for revitalization was organized by the community and resulted in generational leadership and long-term community development. The most valuable and long lasting impact of the Bronx River Alliance’s work was empowering community members to exercise their voices and creating space for their demands to be heard. The design community was invited to the table to work in conjunction with their efforts, not lead the neighborhood restoration project. In the end, the neighbors that were directly impacted by any potential planning work led the process.

Building Community Capacity, Not Just Buildings
Another example of creating trusting relationships between designers and community members is Anne-Marie’s experience leading the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh (now Design Center). The organization stretches beyond the traditional delivery of design services by linking resources and developing design capacity within non-profit organizations and communities.

Founded in 1968 as the Pittsburgh Architects Workshop, the Design Center provides Design Fund grants to nonprofit community development organizations to hire private design firms—architects, landscape architects and urban designers and planners—to develop preliminary designs for strategic projects. Rather than provide design services, Design Center staff offer technical assistance to help grantees navigate the design process. Activities include helping with project strategy, stakeholder engagement, development of a scope of work and request for proposal, selection of and engagement with a design firm, and the working relationship with the design team. At the conclusion of the process, the community has a completed design proposal as well as an understanding and ownership of the decisions and process that informed it, all of which can be used to advocate for and solicit funding and support for implementation. The learning experience facilitated by the Design Center has enabled local community development organizations like East Liberty Development Inc (ELDI) to develop in-house capacity and expertise to undertake more ambitious projects.

The Design Center’s practice connects communities with resources, information, expertise and knowledge that gives them agency and power to envision and implement change in their physical surroundings. Through these collaborative efforts, Anne-Marie and the organization built capacity that has enabled Pittsburgh communities to lead their own planning processes that engage stakeholders and designers in visioning for the future.

Equitable Processes Sustain Just Outcomes
Both Alexie’s and Anne-Marie’s experiences included the development of long-term leadership and capacity within the communities they worked. Their equitable processes and projects produced opportunities for advocacy and fundamentally shifted the process of building environments. Design as a process can redistribute decision-making abilities to historically marginalized communities so they are civically in control of shaping their built environment. Design should actively pursue outcomes that support the growth and access of civil rights. This level of systems shifting outcomes take time, but we need to move forward with intention, so that design in the public interest pushes equity and is active and relevant to the larger social justice movement.

By Theresa Hwang with Anne-Marie Lubenau and Alexie Torres-Fleming

Do you have any examples of projects, people, or orgs that are designing for equity? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Be sure to check back March 18th for the fourth feature article in this series – “Finding Your Path” by Nicole Joslin and sign up for our mailing list to stay in touch!

This article originally appeared on Impact Design Hub on March 4th, 2015. 

Public interest design. Social impact design. Community based design. These are labels that many of us use regularly to define the work we do… but what do these words actually mean? As Barbara Brown Wilson and Katie Swenson acknowledged in the introduction to this series, we are at a time when our movement is blossoming. Yet, as the numbers in this field increase, it has become clear that there is not only a broad range of labels, but also a broad range of definitions for what constitutes good work. Many believe that developing common metrics is the answer to this challenge, but we can’t agree on metrics until we first agree on the words we use to discuss the work and its impacts.

You say tomato. I say tomato.
We all say things like we want our project to “benefit the community,” we are “interested in diversity,” or we have an “engagement process.” But a little poking reveals that we often have different definitions for seemingly simple words like “community,” “diversity,” and “engagement.”

For example, Liz Ogbu is currently working on a project in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco to convert a former power plant site into a neighborhood-serving hub. The neighborhood is one of the poorest in the city, but is now experiencing significant gentrification. Liz and her team describe this as a “community-based” project, but who is the “community?” Is it specifically the African-American residents who have been the historic base of this neighborhood? Or is it all low-income residents in the neighborhood, regardless of color? Or is it all residents of the neighborhood regardless of color or income? Although it is easy to align “community” solely with underserved populations, designing for equity here means addressing the complexity of the broader community. How that community is defined significantly impacts the outcomes of the project, and could mean the difference between a project that supports existing power dynamics and one that dismantles them. A common language is critical if we are to move beyond just doing good to achieving equity as well as to enabling accountability for how we practice and what we create.

Where do we begin?
We recognize that there have been other attempts to define terms in this field. However, there are a number of important words that remain either under-addressed or undefined, so we began exploring our own list of terms.

With input from a varied group of about 30 practitioners — from different sectors (academia, nonprofits, private sector) and fields of design (urban planning, architecture, graphic design, service design) — we’ve put together a hefty list of terms we hope to tackle over the next several months. In the meantime, we’ve started with a few terms that are highly critical to — yet notably absent from — discussions in the design fields

We have attempted to provide initial definitions of these terms, along with some thoughts on why they are critical to the field, especially at this moment in time. Throughout this series of posts, our collaborators will share projects and practices that further illustrate what these terms mean in the context of design.

Diversity
“The condition of having or being composed of differing elements: especially:  the inclusion of different types of people (such as people of different races or cultures) in a group or organization.”[i]

Diversity means having representation of all groups. And one of the themes in this series is the call for more diversity in the field: based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, field of study, type of expertise, and other factors. This call for diversity is based on the belief that there are real barriers keeping talented people out of the field, and that we must work to reduce and eliminate those barriers. We have also come to believe that it is critical that our organizations should ultimately look more like the communities we serve, and be working to build capacity and leadership in those communities.

We start with diversity because it’s fairly easy to understand. But, perhaps because of that, we often end there as well. While diversity is important, it’s only a step on the way to a larger, more critical goal of achieving social equity. Achieving equity isn’t just about representation (making sure the field looks like the communities it serves); it is about significant action to transform the environments we engage in a meaningful and sustained way. That is why our focus here goes far beyond increasing diversity in the field and instead calling for a focus on equity as the end goal that all of our work should build towards.

Equality
“The quality or state of being equal, of having the same rights, etc.”[ii]

Before we talk about equity, let’s talk about equality. They are often used interchangeably but are fundamentally different. Equality is defined by access to opportunity. When we cut up a pie among eight people and each pie slice is the same size, we have equality. It sounds great, but equality only works if everyone starts from the same place. In reality, we know that we do not all stand on a level playing field, especially the communities in which our work is often sited.

Equity
“Equity means fairness. Equity…means that peoples’ needs guide the distribution of opportunities for well-being. Equity…is not the same as equality… Inequities occur as a consequence of differences in opportunity, which result, for example in unequal access to health services, nutritious food or adequate housing. In such cases, inequalities…arise as a consequence of inequities in opportunities in life.”[iii]

 So what is equity, then? Equity, is concerned not just with opportunity, but also with the barriers that make those opportunities unequal. Whereas equality would demand eight equal pie slices and diversity would require that the pie slices be distributed to a broad range of people, equity would lead us to ask, “How much pie does each individual need? Have some individuals eaten already? Are others particularly hungry? Are some allergic to this flavor of pie?” An equitable slicing of the pie might lead to slices of different sizes.

Equity is particularly important when we recognize that equality is often an illusion because some populations face substantial barriers to accessing their “equal” rights. For example, distributing school funding based on equality would mean grants are available to any school that applies, and the school with the strongest application will be awarded the funds. An equity lens would recognize that some schools are more in need of the grants, and that those same schools are less likely to score high in their application due to lack of resources. It is critical to recognize that in cases like this, an equality model could, in fact, perpetuate the disparities that keep the poorer performing schools behind.

The focus on equity makes clear that our projects are not “good” just because we are bringing design to communities that have not had access to it. Our work should also strive to create greater equity in society and to eradicate the barriers that prevent some from accessing resources. It means that how we do the project and what the result of the project is really matters. This has implications for a broad range of factors, including how we engage with communities we are not a part of, how we treat our own employees, how we share credit for our work, and how we measure impact.

On some level, everyone in this field understands that, which is why we’re all bringing resources into communities that are not able to access those resources already. But focusing the larger frame of our work on equity means that we are working towards alleviating the discrepancies in access in the first place, as well as the policies, biases, and institutional barriers that create those discrepancies.

Privilege
“A right or benefit that is given to some people and not to others.”[iv]

“Refers to the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because of their race, class, socio-economic status, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other characteristic they largely do not control. Generally people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it, and often don’t witness the experience of those who lack privilege.”[v]

Privilege is an intense word, but it underlies everything we do in this field. The act of bringing a resource into a community that has not had access to that resource is entirely predicated on one group of people being privileged enough to offer that resource. Privilege is a word people use for name-calling, which makes us shy away from understanding it and talking about it. However, as a field, that means that we are not training ourselves to responsibly and humbly enter a community with a frank discussion of privilege. Our actions are informed by our privilege, which may stem from our race or ethnicity, our socio-economic status, our class, our family history, our gender, our schooling, our social connections, or our access to power.

Whether or not we seek privilege or power, we have it, and we have to address it. We can use it for good, we can give it up, we can put it on the table when we talk with or about the people who don’t have it, and we can put it in the hands of others. Arguably, the latter is an intention that many of us enter this field with, but intention is not the same as action. Acting on privilege means tangibly acknowledging that the pie can’t be cut equally to be equitable, and doing something about it. It means recognizing that we are often in situations where a community isn’t in a position of power to push back at us when our design doesn’t reflect their input. It means acknowledging that the person funding our work can instill us with more power than the community members we’re hoping to serve. It means helping the community members who lack connections and access to have just as much of a voice and power as those who do. It is about understanding that achieving equity requires us to create an environment where everyone regardless of status or background can articulate their needs and the differing power dynamics.

The field of community organizing, where an active effort to take on issues of privilege is common, has helped our group find a way to productively talk about privilege. In particular, we have found that a guided activity that allows a group to explore and visualize their own privileges can be an eye-opening experience that creates space for this kind of conversation in our work.

Power
“The ability or right to control people or things.”[vi]
“The ability to coerce others’ behavior. Power also includes access to social, political, and economic resources.”[vii]

Understanding privilege means also understanding power, as they often go hand in hand. Privilege gives many of us an invisible, yet highly influential, level of power— the power to determine how the pie is cut. By not acknowledging privilege or power, we often fail to acknowledge (or properly leverage) the scale of our influence on projects. This can lead to stand-alone projects that are interesting in concept but are limited in terms of deep and sustained impact.

We must remind ourselves that design itself is a tool of power — it is a specialized skill that not everyone has access to. As someone who has that skill, each one of us makes decisions about in whose hands we will place that power. For example, as an intermediary in a community, we might have power to push policymakers on their own thinking about the community. Christine Gaspar saw this happen many times in her work in Mississippi at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. As a white, educated person with significant credentials, she was often privy to conversations about low-income communities of color in which significant decisions were made, and in which those communities had no place at the table. While she was not in any way elected to represent those communities, she felt that it was her duty as a person with the privilege of being in that room, to use any power she had to advocate on their behalf, at least until such a time when those people could be in the room themselves (ideally as the decision-makers).

Many of us are drawn to this work because we instinctively understand that and are intentionally making choices about where we place power. But few of us have had the opportunity to discuss what that power even means and to learn how to simultaneously diffuse the power dynamic when working with communities, while wielding our power to bring about greater equity.

Help us create a shared language

This essay is a starting point. We hope we have opened up some space to talk about thorny issues like equity, privilege, and power. But this is a work in progress and part of a larger iterative process. We hope you’ll help add to this list. If you have words to share, add them as a comment to this article or email them to us. We also invite you to visit the Design for Equity website. In the coming months, we’ll be using that platform to add new words and definitions related to design for equity, share more information about the overall effort, and identify more opportunities to advance this conversation. We hope you’ll join us.

-  Christine Gaspar and Liz Ogbu

Check back on March 11th for the next feature article in this series – “Designing for Equity: Using a Civil Rights Framework” By Theresa Hwang with Anne-Marie Lubenau and Alexie Torres-Fleming.

Image sources: Anne Hamersky, Jess Zimbabwe and Christine Gasper


[i] Merriam-Webster online at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diversity retrieved on 2/15/15

[ii] Merriam-Webster online at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equality retrieved on 2/15/15

[iii] “Glossary of Terms,” from the Public Health Agency of Canada, retrieved from http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/php-psp/ccph-cesp/glos-eng.php. The glossary was compiled by Dr. John M. Last in October 2006 and revised and edited by Peggy Edwards in August 2007. This quote has been edited to remove references to public health, since we believe the same notion applies to the design field and to society more broadly.

[iv] Merriam-Webster online at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/privilege retrieved on 2/15/15

[v] From: “Racial Equity Resource Guide,” produced by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s “America’s Healing” initiative, retrieved from http://www.racialequityresourceguide.org/about/glossary on 2/15/15 The site identifies the following source: Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women Studies.” The quote here has been modified to remove references to white privilege, and to more broadly address a range of privileges.

[vi] Merriam-Webster online at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power retrieved on 2/15/15

[vii] Shaw, Dr. Susan, “Difference, Power, and Privilege” presentation retrieved fromhttp://www.consumerstar.org/resources/pdf/shaw.pdf on 2/15/15

By Barbara Brown Wilson & Katie Swenson

This article originally appeared on Impact Design Hub on February 25th, 2015. 

Over the past few weeks, news of the closure of Architecture For Humanity has led to many critiques and questions, not only about the future of AfH, but the future of the entire field of public interest design. Inspired in the 1960s by the civil rights movement and maintained by humble practitioners across the globe, this dynamic constellation of practices is not defined by the rise or fall of a single organization or figurehead. Instead of calling the entire field into question, what the response to the closure of AfH serves to highlight are major weaknesses the field is now mature enough to address head on.

Although there are many different practice types and priorities operating under the umbrella of ‘public interest design’ (or related terms), much of that work is not focused on ameliorating injustice. In order to ensure that the field is concerned with action towards beneficial impact we need a shift in priorities; we need to focus on designing for equity.

Equity means more than just equality; equity means fighting against systemic injustices, breaking down implicit biases, and helping people change their “existing situations into preferred ones,” to paraphrase Herbert Simon’s definition of design. To be sure, this is no easy feat, but we believe there are two important leverage points through which we can influence this system: 1) evaluating community design work by its equity outcomes and 2) expanding the leadership base so that our collective voice is marked by diversity, not heroism.

EQUITY OUTCOMES
As the field has matured, many practitioners acknowledge the need for more thoughtful critique, a more rigorous focus on equity and impacts, and a better understanding of how this work gets done well. It is time to take stock in what we do, how we do it, and what types of change it creates in the communities we serve. There is not enough critical discussion about the actual impacts of our work; we operate under the assumption that our intention to work in the “public interest” makes our work inherently good. This is not enough.

As our field matures we need to aspire to setting a higher bar of practice - from our individual projects, to our employment practices, to our methods of community engagement. We have to think about how all aspects of our work can contribute to greater equity and social justice. We need to orient the profession more directly to notions of civil rights and collectively hold ourselves accountable to them.

DIVERSITY NOT HEROISM
What is exciting about the moment we find ourselves in now is clarity that the profession no longer needs be defined by the work of one or two large organizations. There are thousands of nonprofit organizations, for-profit entities, and volunteer networks across the globe doing this work well, and without fanfare. Leadership pipelines that amplify this diversity are essential. The voices of younger practitioners, non-architect/planner disciplines, people of color, and grassroots community leaders are still notably absent in this field, and leave the conversation to be driven by only a few perspectives.

If we are to elevate the dialogue related to designing for equity, new platforms are needed in which new voices can contribute to the language, evaluation metrics, principles upheld, and narratives told about this work. And this will not happen until we also have a leadership model that pays attention to more than a few architect-heroes who dominate popular critique.

LEADING BY EXAMPLE
Over the past year, a group of leaders in the field began meeting informally to discuss how they might help bring more visibility to these critical issues. What began as a few friends seeking moments of collective reflection became a working group with two key goals; first to actively commit to equity outcomes, and second to promote diversity of all kinds throughout our field (and in particular, within it’s leadership).

This group looks at the field through different lenses and operates at different scales, including Christine Gaspar from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, Jess Garz from the Surdna Foundation, Theresa Hwang from Skid Row Housing Trust, Nicole Joslin from Women.Design.Build, Liz Ogbu from Studio O, Katie Swenson from Enterprise Community Partners, Barbara Brown Wilson from the University of Virginia, and Jess Zimbabwe from the Rose Center for Public Leadership.

We are writing a series of articles to dig into these topics and formulate a fresh approach. Our goal is to elevate the dialogue related to designing for equity by holding up new voices and new perspectives. In the coming weeks we’ll share a new article each Wednesday. We invite you all to join, comment, critique, and suggest ideas and topics on how to propel the public interest design movement forward at this critical juncture. Please check back next week for the next feature article, “Using Our Words: The Language of Design for Equity” by Christine Gaspar and Liz Ogbu and visit our website, DesignforEquity.org, to sign up for our mailing list and connect to resources.

Image sources: Jess Zimbabwe, Metropolis Magazine