Design lessons about DEI in 2020
Today is a day of service. Thanks to the pandemic, I can’t leave the house so I’m writing this hoping it’s of service to someone. What keeps me working in adult education is that I get to learn new things. This last year I got to learn about Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) in a different way than I had in my career. I realized that as a designer I have a systematic impact on the experiences of people who take my courses. Instead of just a subject that I needed to learn for a project, I recognized DEI is something that cuts across every course I had ever written. This filled me with a desire to improve myself and outcomes for my learners. Here are a few of my lessons from this year.
1. There is a ton of history to catch up on
Early in 2020 I recognized I had a knowledge gap. So, I bought books. I read The New Jim Crow and I read A People’s History of the United States. Both are excellent reads and they contained things that were not taught or even hinted at in school. Both books made me realize that beyond an individual’s actions, the systems that we live in by accident and by design, put some at an advantage while actively suppressing others. Sometimes by trying to help, well-meaning people such as myself participate in and even build systems that are advantageous to ourselves but denigrating to others.
2. I tried to put into practice some of what I had learned
I had learned about bias years ago when I was pursuing my BA in Philosophy. Beyond just recognizing the kinds of bias we have, this year I learned I need to examine my assumptions by including more voices in my designs.
One thing I started to do as a designer to try and limit bias in my design is, at the start of a project I thought about what intersections of race, gender, religion, culture etc… exist on my project team and which are absent. I plotted things out as best as I could in a spreadsheet. Then I systematically tried to include voices from the missing elements in my design from my audience and from my stakeholders. The idea was to systematically limit my team’s biases in a design. Once more people were included we tried to do a lot of listening. We set up design sessions and gave people from other teams the stage. Instead of doing very structured interviews where we could lead users towards our own biases we let them guide the conversation. We did these things but we could have done it better because…
3. There is a whole conversation going on
I mostly tried to fill in gaps that my design team had in their point of view by randomizing user testing and by consulting a vast array of SMEs, probably more than I had in any project before. I could have improved my process by inviting more interaction between SME’s. I took too much of what SME’s said as gospel individually when I could have opened up a larger conversation with the whole of the group. I could have also called on the project team to try and self-identify some of the biases we had going into the project. Having everything on the table can make it easier to hold yourself accountable.
I asked a friend for some advice of how I could have been clued into the changes happening in DEI a little better. On their advice I read Hood Feminism, which is a book that was more challenging than the other books I had read at the start of the year as it didn’t offer nice clean cut historical narratives. This book is picking a fight with mainstream feminism as it exists today and it highlighted ongoing disagreements happening academically but also in policy and on Twitter. Reading that, more than anything, made me realize that after this year I still don’t know a lot but I’m excited to keep learning.
This year has taught me that we’re all in different places when it comes to DEI and that’s ok. I’d love to hear about your journey and how you’re using the influence you have to create better outcomes for everyone.