(This conversation is republished courtesy of the Aspen Institute’s Center for Urban Innovation. Check out the story and more stories like these on their site found here.)

This interview is part of the Aspen Institute Center for Urban Innovation’s series of conversations with inclusive innovation practitioners.

Jennifer Bradley: What does co-creation mean to you?

Caroline Hill: When I think about co-creation, I think about what it is like to design with people rather than for them, from the inception of understanding the problem to the process that you use to solve it. In the traditional design thinking or innovation frame, there might be a designer and a user. In true co-creation, you’re just two designers of equal status with different levels of expertise that you access when needed. That’s different than the way we currently approach a lot of innovation work.

Caroline Hill, Founder, DC Equity Lab; Co-founder, Equity Design Collaborative

JB: How do you apply co-creation to your organization, or your work?

CH: I think there’s a couple of tangible examples from our work with the truancy taskforce in DC. One of the first prerequisites for co-creation is having the people who experience the problem in the room. We coordinated with school leaders to have students in the room.

You have to realize that students are distant from policy. There are oftentimes other practices that are interfering with the child’s experience that must be reconciled before you write something into a law. When you actually listen to a student who says, “Oh, I love school,” and, “My father values school, too,” and, “I get in trouble when I don’t go to school, but there is a two-hour commute from my house to my school,” you see beyond the prevailing assumption that kids who are truant don’t value school. There are other systemic barriers in their lives. This is more complex than putting a policy in place and saying, “Go to school or you’re going to be in trouble.” For the students who are most marginalized and most affected, going to school is the end goal, but there are a lot of high hurdles that that family has to overcome.

One of the first prerequisites for co-creation is having the people who experience the problem in the room.

What was really awesome is that, when the students realized that not everyone had two-hour commutes to school, they really got angry. They’re like, “Wait a minute, why is this happening only on this side of the city? Why are there only three grocery stores on this side of the city? Why does only this side of the city have a two or three-hour commute? That’s not right.”

One of the big lessons we learned was that it wasn’t only the policy that was getting in the way, it was oftentimes their experience at the school level. They said, “Oh, the door was closed in my face when I got to school.” Then, we talk to the leader of the school, and the leader responds, “I’m trying to maintain a high expectations environment, where kids have to be on time.” But the student’s experience is, “I travel two hours to get here. I have to drop off three of my siblings before I get to school.” Then how do you reconcile both of those truths and figure out the next best option?

Image:Courtesy of DC Equity Lab

JB: What are the challenges that come with co-creation?

CH: I think there are some technical challenges and there are some adaptive challenges. We are separate from each other, so at the technical level, how do we get the people in the same room? Where are the people who are most affected? When you talk to school leaders and teachers, they say, “We want you to work with the most marginalized student in the class.” Well, that student doesn’t come to school. You really only know the students who are engaged, right?

Then, if you’re the one with privilege, you have to surrender that privilege and include the other person. That can be uncomfortable for someone who’s always experienced being recognized for being an expert. It takes a lot to say, “Actually I’m not the expert here, and that’s okay, because another person is.” No one in my immediate family ever experienced truancy, for example, so I don’t even have a framework for what that experience is.

Once people are in the same room, once you overcome the spatial segregation, then what do we do to overcome spiritual and emotional segregation?

There is a physical, emotional, and psychological distance between those who are most affected by systems of oppression and others. Once people are in the same room, once you overcome the spatial segregation, then what do we do to overcome spiritual and emotional segregation?

JB: What would you tell an organization or an individual who wants to co-create with the people that they are trying to serve?

CH: First start with yourself. That means understanding the role that your identity plays in the privilege and the power that you hold. That means understanding the problem that you’re trying to solve, and asking yourself in what ways are you best equipped to solve this problem, and understanding that expertise might not exist with you, and making room for other people at the table. Those who have the most privilege and power have a responsibility to get comfortable ceding that power in order to bring other people closer. Being inclusive is hard, because you don’t oftentimes move as fast as you want to. The process might take longer, but you brought tons of people along with you.

Systems of inequity have been designed by people, and they can be redesigned.

JB: What are the values that underlie co-creation for you?

CH: One value is that everyone is a designer, everyone has wonderful ideas.

Another is that systems of inequity have been designed by people, and they can be redesigned. We can’t fix these problems in the same way they were created. We have to use radically different methods. Whether it’s segregation along racial lines, or socioeconomic lines, or gender lines, the way to solve it is to do the opposite. If you are not around people who push you to question your practices and beliefs, you fall into bad habits. I believe in safe spaces, but I am wary of any hyper-segregated space. It creates the opportunity to slip into bad behavior, and that’s the behavior that we hurt each other with.

JB: Is there anything else you think readers should know about co-creation?

CH: When you’re co-creating, and you’re trying to solve problems, one of the first steps is identifying the most marginalized. That provides the template for solving all the other cases. I gave a talk at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I said, “If we could figure out how to make a poor, trans girl of color, who doesn’t speak English, who’s non-Christian… if we could figure out how to make her thrive in school, we’ve figured it out.”

The life chances of someone who is at the bottom of every single social hierarchy are slim to none. I think that’s what’s at stake now, realizing that we’ve created [these] conditions. We can fix it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This blog series is supported by the Citi Foundation, a vital early supporter of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute. With the Citi Foundation’s help, the Center convened leading-edge practitioners to develop a shared set of principles to guide a cross-sector approach to inclusive innovation in low- and middle-income neighborhoods, and to determine how the Aspen Institute could support this practice.

The equityXdesign process is a labor of love created by Caroline Hill from 228 Accelerator, Michelle Molitor from The Equity Lab, & Christine Ortiz from Equity Meets Design. If you like this piece, please hit the heart below so others can see it as well.

If you found this intriguing, stay in touch by joining our mailing lists.

If you are interested in designing for, accelerating and scaling equity in your schools and organizations, please connect with Caroline at caroline@228accelerator.com.

If you’re doing work at the intersection of equity and design, need additional capacity around equity and design in your program or organization, or want to apply equityXdesign to a project, sayhello@equitymeetsdesign.com.

If you’re interested in working to take on our most intractable race, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI) problems for your organization or sector, accelerating our transition toward a more liberatory, community-centered society that values the gifts and potential of all its members, contact The Equity Lab at https://www.theequitylab.org/contact/.

I have never felt more Puerto Rican than I do now.

Which is interesting because I have been very Puerto Rican all of my life. Besides how I look, there were all the typical trappings of a mainland Puerto Rican upbringing. I learned English from sesame street. Ate pernil at thanksgiving and missed the first two weeks of every spring semester because we were in Puerto Rico for Three King’s Day.

But this is different.

You see — At home, my Puerto Rican-ness was just a way of life. But everywhere else, it was a tool. I learned to pull it out in two situations:

1: in small talk — when it could be used to make people feel appropriately multicultural as they shared with me their passion for salsa dancing or love of plantains

Or

2: as the setting for a story in which I erased the core of my lived experience so the darkest pieces of my life could be held in contrast to my triumphs, creating an Algeresque tale that unfailingly opened doors for me and made everyone else feel better about their role as gatekeepers.

I repeated and was rewarded for this story so often I began to believe it myself.

You see — if we define education equity merely as ensuring that demographics don’t predict outcomes you could squarely put me as a tick in the win column. And while I would use many words to describe my educational experience — equitable would not be one.

Equity is not a goal, a set of metrics or a checklist. It is a way of being, a mindset, a practice. Equity is a Verb.

And over the last 29 days, as I have felt the ground fall out from under me time and again, I have been reminded of this — because just as equity is a verb — so is inequity.

And inequity never stops moving.

A routine has emerged for me since the morning of September 20th, 2017. I wake up. I call my mom. I ask for an update. Has she heard from anyone recently? Almost the entirety of my family still lives on the island of Puerto Rico. Most of them in Cabo Rojo, a tiny town on the south west tip of the island. As far as you could get from where Maria’s eye made landfall, they were spared the kind of devastation some of my other family has faced. Having lived for generations in a literal “mountain-side” community outside of Ponce, a number of my great aunt and uncles homes have completely disappeared, simply slid down the side of the mountain.

For most of the first week, with no contact or news, I was paralyzed by the fear and the worry. On day 6, we finally got word that our immediate relatives were all okay. The fear and worry turned into a feeling of impotence. As someone with a huge internal locus of control, this was literally unbearable. To the point where as an escape valve I got the island of Puerto Rico tattooed on my arm. It was cathartic.

And it’s not the tattoo that makes me feel more Puerto Rican now than ever before, but the fact that this storm has finished destroyed the walls I had built — separating my culture at home with my parents from who I was with my friends and colleagues. I am now Puerto Rican — both at home and at work — in private and in public. The storm was a moment of reconciliation — allowing me to realize that my lived reality, my experience was a powerful lens I can use to interrogate and understand the world in which we live, and the world I want to leave for my daughter.

I was paralyzed for a long time, and didn’t know what to do until I read a piece by Yarimar Bonilla who wrote “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” It was that line that reminded me of my own power and the framework EDC had created, which allowed me to see the path forward.

The premise of our work is this: Racism and inequity (and therefore suffering) are products of design. They can be redesigned.

We must recognize the creative agency we hold and the creative agency in each and every person around us. We must believe that we are all designers, and take up the task of redesigning the interactions, interventions and institutions we are all a part of to not just strive towards some “equitable” end goal, but to be equity in motion.

The equityXdesign process is a labor of love created by Caroline Hill from 228 Accelerator, Michelle Molitor from The Equity Lab, & Christine Ortiz from Equity Meets Design. If you like this piece, please hit the heart below so others can see it as well.

If you found this intriguing, stay in touch by joining our mailing lists.

If you are interested in designing for, accelerating and scaling equity in your schools and organizations, please connect with Caroline at caroline@228accelerator.com.

If you’re doing work at the intersection of equity and design, need additional capacity around equity and design in your program or organization, or want to apply equityXdesign to a project, sayhello@equitymeetsdesign.com.

If you’re interested in working to take on our most intractable race, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI) problems for your organization or sector, accelerating our transition toward a more liberatory, community-centered society that values the gifts and potential of all its members, contact The Equity Lab at https://www.theequitylab.org/contact/.

The process of bacterial growth provides useful analogs for developing a deeper understanding of how our own culture has come to be and continues to evolve. First, bacterial cultures require certain media. Staphylococcus is differentiated in a salt agar. Haemophilus sp thrives in chocolate agar. Different nutrients are used to promote and promulgate the growth of particular species. Second, the environmental conditions must be optimized for peak growth. Temperature, pH, humidity, and oxygen levels are all levers microbiologists pull to create the ideal growth conditions for each species. Simulations at heart, these environments are controlled, bounded, and designed for a certain outcome — to optimize for the growth of a particular species of bacteria.

This makes me wonder then, what is our medium?

Our medium — what feeds our culture and encourages it growth — are ideas. These ideas are not the offspring of spontaneous generation. They are the progeny of history. They act as governors on our relationships. These ideas manifest in our work and in our being. These ideas give us explicit and implicit directions on the very connections that define our humanity.

It also makes me wonder then, what are the environmental levers we can pull? And what outcome those levers are designed to produce?

To optimize the environment for each of the 100,000 different species of bacteria we need to adjust key variables — changing things like the temperature, pH, and oxygen levels. As humans, we think this is also true for us. It is not. While there are close to 7 billion humans, we are just one species, and we need the same core elements to thrive. Yet, we continue to work to separate ourselves from each other. We can use our language, our practices, and our relationships with each other to create a universal sense of belonging.

Unfortunately, the ideas that we scaled the best and optimized for growth are the very ideas that damage our relationships with each other. They design our geospatial relationships — our cities, neighborhoods, and enclaves. Constructors of our most intimate friendships, they arbitrate marital fitness — meting and doling out who is fit and unfit for human relationship and connection. They till the soils of isolation creating the fuel and the rhetoric to justify the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. Their lethal power lies in their ability to judge wholeness and humanity through relationships of subjugation and hierarchy. These ideas normalize emotional, physical, and spiritual distance. Oppression, the mistreatment of other people at scale, then, is the outcome these ideas are designed to produce.

This oppression is often hard to see and name for two reasons. First, the engagement of these ideas often generates feelings of deep hurt, vulnerability, and humiliation. These feelings silence us. Second, these ideas are often disregarded or denied by those who hold significant power, privilege, and position.

We believe that it is important to name the these ideas to denature their catalytic power.

These are 10 ideas that fuel oppression:

Idea 1: lighter skinned people deserve more love, power, affection, wealth, grace, and dignity than darker skinned people

Idea 2: males are smarter, more trustworthy, better leaders, more responsible, stronger, and more honest than females

Idea 3: richer people are smarter, more trustworthy, more responsible, and deserve more aspiration and grace than poorer people

Idea 4: christians are more trustworthy, righteous, and more justified in their violence than non-christians

Idea 5: heterosexuals are more natural and deserving of love, dignity, humanity, and companionship than lesbians, gays, and bisexuals

Idea 6: cisgender people are more natural, deserving of love, companionship, dignity, and humanity than transgender people

Idea 7: english speakers with dominant culture accents are more intelligent than non english speakers or those with different accents

Idea 8:people who are differently abled (physically and mentally) are less intelligent than able bodied people

Idea 9:young adults are seen as smarter, more creative, more energetic, and more employable than older adults, teens, and children

Idea 10: adults with college degrees are smarter than adults without college degrees

These ideas fuel oppression by making it easy for us to create physical, emotional, and spiritual distance from each other. The magnitude of this mistreatment is evident in the experiences of the most marginalized — those who when positioned in the hierarchies of our social relationships always assume a bottomed, subjugated position. Consider the life chances of a non Christian, differently abled, dark skin transgender woman of color without a college degree who does not speak English. With 2017 being a record breaking year for deadliest violence against transgender women, it is no wonder why we have to scream black lives matter. We have to cry out that trans lives matter.

The +1 Stability Clause

The stability clause is perhaps the most dangerous of these ideas. It asserts that these ideas will not change and will continue to govern our relationships in the present and for future generations. The stability clause is guilty of the most imperfect crime — the theft of power, agency, and hope.

Humans have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. An ever-evolving symbiosis, millions of the digestive bacteria of our ancestors were first unemployed and then extinct. Shifts in our diet reduce the need for some species to exist. We changed our behavior. Bacteria became extinct.

Our cultural media bounds our current relationships with other people. We must develop the courage to expand our imagination to envision a world where these ideas, like the bacteria, become extinct. We must change our behavior. How do we name the ideas when we see them? How do we create a space for repair and reconciliation? How do we move towards true liberation from these ideas? When we imagine and work towards the state of their extinction, we will have transcended the need for social constructs. We will be humanity unbound.

Caroline Hill is a lover of all things lit, righteous, and good. She is co-author of the equityXdesign framework and leads school creation and transformation work in Washington, D.C.

The equityXdesign process is a labor of love created by Caroline Hill from 228 Accelerator, Michelle Molitor from The Equity Lab, & Christine Ortiz from Equity Meets Design. If you like this piece, please hit the heart below so others can see it as well.

If you found this intriguing, stay in touch by joining our mailing lists.

If you are interested in designing for, accelerating and scaling equity in your schools and organizations, please connect with Caroline at caroline@228accelerator.com.

If you’re doing work at the intersection of equity and design, need additional capacity around equity and design in your program or organization, or want to apply equityXdesign to a project, sayhello@equitymeetsdesign.com.

If you’re interested in working to take on our most intractable race, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI) problems for your organization or sector, accelerating our transition toward a more liberatory, community-centered society that values the gifts and potential of all its members, contact The Equity Lab at https://www.theequitylab.org/contact/.

The experiment of America is 240 years old. In these 240 years, systems were designed that isolate and separate us, that empower a chosen few with the privilege of invention, innovation, and creativity, that lay the groundwork for misunderstanding, fear, and ultimately hate.

Racism and inequity are products of design. They can be redesigned.

We believe that in community, with thoughtful and deliberate action, we can design the obsolescence of those systems. We offer equityXdesign, a practice that organizations, teams, and individuals can use to mitigate the impact of racism and inequity in design practices.

As a collaborative, this work is our voice — an offering to the legacy of liberation, truth, and democracy. We collectively leverage the magic of relationships across difference to design right-fit solutions. Christine empowers people to reimagine themselves as school designers and founders. Michelle helps people find their own voices as anti racist leaders for equity. Caroline activates the voices of the marginalized to strengthen relationships, particularly those across lines of difference. Given who we are and what we know, we feel uniquely positioned to contribute to this fight, in this way — at the intersection of equity and design. We know it is not the only thing that needs to be done. It is no silver bullet, but it is where we think our energy has the greatest return.

As leaders from the racial equity and design and innovation spaces, we offer equityXdesign — a new way to think about and approach achieving equity. equityXdesign creates the conditions and relationships for inclusive innovation. A process for anti-racist and equitable design, it is guided by three central beliefs: innovation’s need for inclusion and intentional design, the indistinguishable relationship between the past and the present, and our moral imperative to live in the future we desire to create.

equityXdesign is a practice that merges the consciousness of racial equity work with the methodology of design thinking. We believe that designing for the most affected and marginalized, letting their voices and experiences lead, and acknowledging the barriers to engagement are critical for this new process. Most importantly, we believe this design work must happen across racial difference. All people have the capacity for innovation. We believe it is this multiplicity of entry points that will create the conditions for new invention and innovations for equity. This practice is for teams of educators, designers, advocates, and agitators committed to building internal capacity and confidence designing for equity. It is reserved for those who believe we are stronger together and have the bold imagination to cultivate new ideas, invent equitable institutions, and reform biased policies.

MOVING EQUITY WORK TOWARD ACTION

American history has created a segregated world where white people are rarely in community with others. The isolation creates myths, stories, and beliefs that go unchallenged, and people of color are not immune. The work of acknowledgement, the telling of truths, and the opportunities for community and reflection are necessary before we can move forward. If we remain unwilling to do serious individual, institutional, and structural work as a people, our path toward a truly equitable future will stagnate.

Helping us see and understand our history, bringing us in community with one another in ways that allow us to hear each other, the raising of voices traditionally lost in the white noise of hegemonic discourse — this is the power of equity work.

From large government agencies to schools, tech startups, nonprofits, and philanthropic groups, the education ecosystem has a very narrow definition of inequity and how it manifests, often focusing only on explicit and intentional racism. But racism today looks different than it did in our Jim Crow past. Overwhelmingly, individuals no longer believe in the biological inferiority of black and brown people; however, while we may all claim egalitarian values, and while it is no longer socially acceptable to treat others differently because of the color of their skin, most of us hold implicit biases that impact our behavior and allow for structural and systemic inequity to remain.

We are living in a "colorblind" society that often recognizes racism as anomalous, individual acts of aggression or the mere acknowledgment of difference, not the silent structures that continue to divide. The victories of the civil rights movement, and now the Obama presidency, have reinforced the notion that we are a post-racial society. However, the lived experiences of millions of people of color reveal otherwise. Racism and other forms of discrimination have simply shifted from explicit and interpersonal to structural and less overt manifestations. The rise of identity-based aggression cannot distract us from recognizing anchoring systems of oppression and how they manifest in the lives of people.

Most of us hold implicit biases that impact our behavior and allow for structural and systemic inequity to remain.

Our individual actions can cumulatively serve to maintain existing forms of inequity — or they can serve to dismantle systems of oppression.

Historically, we have put the expectations of this change entirely on individuals, requiring each of us to maintain a fully developed relationship with our own racial identity, an intimate knowledge of the history of oppression and current manifestations of inequity, and the personal comfort and initiative to see, call out, and actively fight hegemonic systems. The focus of equity work for most organizations leans toward the having of courageous conversations about race and power and on individual racial identity development work. While this approach is necessary, it will not, alone, end individual, institutional, and systemic inequity.

Identity development work takes time and is never complete. Individuals can engage in such work without ever taking action to dismantle systems of oppression — particularly those that benefit from status quo systems or from being seen having such courageous conversations. Additionally, personal work can only progress when individuals first understand and then commit to doing deeper and often painful work. For many this personal work is often seen as unnecessary.

We must start with individuals, but we cannot stop there.

Institutions are the sum of the people within them, and they create the systems and structures we live in. The work of racial equity is to create safe spaces for people, to connect them, and then to move from merely understanding the role of the individual to understanding the role individuals play in institutions and systems. Only then can we move to action.

Our current paradigms and tools for truth, reconciliation, and anti-racist action are insufficient for the magnitude of the challenge we face. Racial equity work engages people in meaningful and authentic conversation, sparking individual transformation but not preparing people to create long-term systemic change. Organizations that engage in racial equity work may create space for individuals to find themselves personally awakened to their role and identity in society, ready to change their institutions for the better, but without the tools to take such action. Consultancies and protocols are not equipped for the complexities of racism’s manifestations within individuals, institutions, and societal structures.

Some say talk is cheap. We disagree. Talk is deeply important, but it is simply not enough. We need to move toward new designs. For many, talking about racism and our long history of oppression feels paralyzing. The complexity of racism on individual, institutional, and structural levels feels insurmountable. Equity work helps us understand where we are and how we got here, but it is missing the tools for building a different reality. It is here that design thinking can lead the way.

DESIGN THINKING: IN NEED OF AN EQUITY RETROFIT

In recent years, design thinking has left its roots as a tool used for product design and emerged as a powerful problem-solving methodology across fields and sectors. This shift in how design thinking is used has come in concert with a societal shift in the way we identify problems and understand solutions.

Our current charge is to solve problems where there is no one solution, where more data and information doesn’t necessarily make things more clear, where the problem is hard to even define. For instance, we know that solving issues of terrorism is less about building better weapons and more about interrupting radical group recruitment strategies. We know that issues of environmental degradation are no longer about technologies for clean energy; they are about incentivizing corporate and consumer behavior changes. We know how the brain learns, but we can’t figure out how to create school environments that are socioeconomically and racially integrated.

Problem-solving is no longer about inventing things; it is about recreating systems. And in a world that continues to increase in complexity and technology, design thinking can simplify, humanize, and order this chaos.

This shift in the way we define problems necessitates a shift in the tools and mindsets we use to solve them. Design thinking provides a framework for complex, iterative, and targeted solutions: It emphasizes the need to define the problem well and build sooner to get better feedback, and it has fundamentally changed the relationship between designers and those they are designing for. This focus on the end user is so central that design thinking is often simply referred to as user- or human-centered design.

While elevating the user in the design process has been the key to its success, it is also the reason why our current approach to design thinking needs to be retrofitted. If we believe design thinking is the right tool to use to redesign products, systems, and institutions to be more equitable, then we must redesign the design thinking process, mindsets and tools themselves to ensure they mitigate for the causes of inequity — the prejudices of the human designers in the process, both their explicit and implicit personal biases, and the power of mostly invisible status quo systems of oppression.

The role of implicit bias is particularly distressing as we consider the design thinking process. In its current state, it may be doing as much harm as it is good. While engaging with end users, many forms of design thinking still see the designer as separate from the user and grant the designer the power in the relationship — the power to decide with whom to do empathy work, the power to interpret the results, the power to decide the framing of the problem, and the power to pick the best solution.

It stands to reason that any problem definition or solution created by biased individuals — which we all are — will perpetuate inequity if the process does not actively acknowledge and combat bias. A process that is itself colorblind will be blind to the effects of color in both problem and solution.

We see this regularly in our work facilitating design challenges with organizations. An example: The well-intentioned, usually white, educated, and middle- to upper-middle-class designers working with low-income urban (code for black and brown) schools to help design new programs know it is important to engage in empathy work, so they ask the principal to give them access to some parents to interview. The principal emails the PTA for volunteers, who are often not representative of the general student body. After a few interviews, the designers go back to their conference room to decide what the parents and students need. They brainstorm options, narrowing to those that fit within the existing structure of the school. In the best-case scenario, the program is something the school community can in fact benefit from — but it is unlikely to be designed to serve students and families most in need or to question status quo systems or structures. But these are essential when designing for equity.

There are many failings in this illustration, some of which can be attributed to a lack of rigor in using true design methodologies. However, even when pure design is applied, issues of power and bias have powerful sway. We can do better.

AN ALTERNATE PATHWAY

Two of the greatest hindrances to fighting inequity are literally hiding in plain sight: our implicit biases and the prevalent narrative of “colorblindness.” If we don’t even know we’re doing something wrong, how can we be expected to change it?

We can enhance the design thinking process with tools frameworks that account for and make visible our individual biases; push us past the individual to the institutional, systemic, and historic inequity at play; and fight against hegemonic ideologies.

Instead of asking individuals to think their way into a new way of behaving, relying on their individual levels of awareness around issues of inequity, we can provide them with a framework that embeds that awareness. We can make design thinking, an already widely accepted and valued process for innovation and problem-solving, into a process that provides individuals with experiences that elevate their understanding of inequity while also providing tools to dismantle systems of inequity.

This is equityXdesign: an additional layer of checks, tools, and activities that, when laid on top of traditional design thinking methodologies, will illuminate racism and inequity — individual, structural, and institutional — that exists in the individuals involved in the design team and potentially shapes the way problems are framed and solutions are proposed.

Design thinking is an ideal starting point. When merged with the power of equity work, we believe it can be used to tackle our most urgent equity-based problems.

EQUITYXDESIGN: DESIGN THINKING’S RETROFIT

equityXdesign intentionally convenes people across difference and builds a common language for system-wide change. It is a framework that reimagines all of us as designers, adjusts for our implicit biases, and minimizes the scale and amplification of a dominant identity throughout. It creates guardrails and checkpoints that nudge design teams to identify problems through a lens of equity, brainstorm transformative possibilities, and prototype and test these possibilities in low-cost, low-resolution, inclusive, and participatory environments.

Pastored by the spirit of inclusive invention, the process engages designers in their own identities and the identities and experiences of their co-designers to seed collaborative, inclusive innovation and invention. The centering ethos — see, be seen, and foresee — overlays the three beliefs we believe are preconditions for equitable design. These beliefs lead us to the five design principles that guide our actions.

THE EQUITYXDESIGN FRAMEWORK

BELIEF #1

LEARNING TO SEE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT MATTERS

Evolutionary science tells us that the most beneficial traits survive; we are the recipients of the genetic legacy of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. And social inheritance mimics this genetic inheritance: We inherit the traits and characteristics of legacies of privilege and oppression. We must see both who we were (our historical selves) and who we are (our current selves). To understand the present time and space we occupy, we must understand the inherited legacy surrounding the thing we are designing, the place we are designing in, and the community we are designing with.

BELIEF #2

BE SEEN: RADICAL INCLUSION

equityXdesign is intentional about bringing diverse stakeholders together across race, role, gender, and socioeconomic status to build relationships and lay the groundwork for community. Inclusion is not merely the absence of exclusion: Radical inclusion requires going further — identifying barriers that exclude and eliminating them; welcoming different people, stories, and experiences to the innovation conversation; creating spaces where everyone can bring their full selves and be equally valued. Radical inclusion is not simply about reducing hate or respecting difference; it is about truly loving others.

BELIEF # 3

FORESEE: PROCESS AS PRODUCT

Process dictates product. To design for equity, we must design equitably. The practice of equitable design requires that we are mindful how we achieve equity. Inclusive design practices raise the voices of the marginalized, strengthen relationships across difference, shift positions, and recharge our democracy. Because exclusion feeds inequity, we can no longer argue that there is not enough time to include the community. We must make time for the magic of human connection, especially across difference.

These core beliefs, and the manifestations thereof, lead us to the following design principles:

DESIGN PRINCIPLE 1: DESIGN AT THE MARGINS

Our current innovation conversation is exclusive, accessible only to the powerful and privileged. This erodes the innate creative agency and leadership in the marginalized, reduces the experience of incredibly complex people, and often leads to the allocation of resources to symptoms while neglecting the existence, permanence, and resilience of root causes.

The current social order blames the marginalized for their experience without acknowledging or attempting to redesign oppressive historical structures. equityXdesign expects the privileged to trust and listen to the voices on the margins to identify the root causes of inequity and the ways they manifest. It positions the marginalized as leaders in the design process and experts in their experience, arming them with a process to solve their own problems.

Designing at the margin means that those in privileged positions do not solve for those experiencing oppression; rather, in true community, both the privileged and marginalized build collective responsibility and innovative solutions for our most intractable problems. Even the use of the word marginalized linguistically parallels the exclusion of individuals. The definition of a group simply by their relationship to the dominant culture is a problem that continues to persist.

DESIGN PRINCIPLE 2: START WITH YOUR SELF

Our identities (race, gender, upbringing, social status, home language, etc.) create our lens for the world and how we make sense of it. We must be aware of this lens when engaging in design. When we design for people without understanding the impact of their historical stories, our understanding slips into paternalism. When we design for people without accounting for our own biases, our understanding slips into stereotypes. We must raise our awareness of our own identities and how bias impacts our thoughts, choices, conclusions, and assumptions to truly co-create with others.

DESIGN PRINCIPLE 3: CEDE POWER

Equity requires a nonviolent, action-oriented spirit of co-creation and co-invention, necessitating an inversion of legacy power structures. Expertise cannot be quantified in degrees, and the designer/end-user dichotomy is no longer useful. We must acknowledge the power dynamics that allow some votes to count more than others. Equitable design demands that practices change and evolve — that we redefine roles, revalue ways of knowing, and reassess the ways we reach decision. We recognize the potential for cede power to reinforce the hegemonic view of power as a zero-sum game — more for you must mean less for me. This is not the case. We believe that shared power is in the interest of everyone and does not require a growth in the ranks of the powerless. And yet, this work still requires each of us, who hold power in some ways, to deeply question its inheritance and its locus and to cede it when necessary.

DESIGN PRINCIPLE 4: MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

The relationships between people and problems are often governed by sets of heuristics — techniques that allow problems to be solved with speed, agility, and economy. However, these preexisting schemas can perpetuate exclusionary assumptions and biased practices, manifesting as implicit bias, power dynamics, and hegemonic practices that govern relationships with people in our organizations, schools, and governments. By making them visible, we can assess their impact and create a space for reflection and repair.

DESIGN PRINCIPLE 5 : SPEAK TO THE FUTURE

Because an equitable reality has never existed, we cannot look to our past to learn how to create an equitable future. With no guide, we must speak this reality into existence. In order to write a different story, we have to use different language. We must replace our current discourse.

Eugene Eubanks, Ralph Parish and Dianne Smith, in “Changing the Discourse in Schools” in Race, Ethnicity, and Multiculturalism: Policy and Practice introduced a framework (Discourse 1 vs Discourse 2) we use to guide our work. Discourse 1 is our current and hegemonic, discourse — the language typically used to talk about, question, and plan the work of reform. This dialogue supports and maintains the status quo without appearing unresponsive to outside demands for improvement. Discourse 2, the discourse of transformation, is the language that tends to be about uncomfortable, unequal, ineffective, prejudicial conditions and relationships. This discourse creates space for ambiguity, change, and the opportunity to be a part of a purposeful structure.

There is an often-overlooked power in language and discourse to influence and control ideas, beliefs, actions, and ultimately culture. When we notice how hegemony dominates our conceptual understanding of problems and how they impact others who are different, we have a powerful opportunity to see the end-users’ historical selves and how those selves manifests in the present.

When we take control of our language, when we speak to the future, we lay the groundwork to create something new — together.

EQUITYXDESIGN IN ACTION

We believe change will come from the intersection of equity, design, and collaboration. We harbor no false beliefs that any exclusive group of individuals is capable of creating the tools society needs to dismantle systemic inequity. Our hope is to create a network of collaborators, inventors, and designers who prioritize equity. At the connections, nodes of opportunity create space where radical inclusion strengthens our individual and collective humanities.

The following modes and adaptations to the design process represent some of the latest retrofits for the stages of the invention practice. They are currently in the pilot phase of development.

Transformational Empathy

Mode 1: Meta-Empathy Maps

The design thinking process begins with empathy to build an understanding of another’s experience. equityXdesign transforms empathy into a tool that helps people recognize how implicit bias and identity can impact their understanding of others. At the center of transformative empathy is listening to understand while also understanding how we listen. Through the use of a modified empathy map and three essential empathy questions, we facilitate this awareness and support the synthesis of the empathy experience.

• Individual: How does my identity impact how I understand my user’s experiences?

• Institutional: What are the important customs and practices at play in my user’s experience?

• Structural: What are the ways customs and practices work together to include or exclude my user?

Mode 2: Notice and Reflect

Adding additional modes to the design thinking process revealed more ways of connecting with others during the empathy stage — notice and reflect. The essence of these modes is captured in a pre-empathy identity reflection activity, which asks individuals to start by articulating some of their core values, emanating from their heart, followed by how they define their own identities. They then reflect on how they are feeling in that moment, biases that might be at play, and finally, any observations the reflection process created about the empathy work that is about to be done.

This adaptation was created by David Clifford, Senior Learning Experience Designer at the Stanford d.School K12 Lab. A veteran educator, master craftsman, and longtime practitioner of equity and design, David is working with the K12 Lab at Stanford to explore the intersection between equity consciousness and design consciousness with both us and the National Equity Project.

Equity Pauses

A sense of urgency can mask hegemonic strategy. Our common discourse of urgency and business-as-usual creates little time for reflection; our pace of life eclipses our awareness. Strategic equity pauses stop the clock to reflect on our language, ideas, and hunches in the context of a discourse of transformation. Without this moment to think, our brains default to the familiar and the known, making a repeat of past practice likely. Incorporating these discourse checks and pauses after each stage ensures that our ideas remain on the path of achieving equity.

Brainstorming and Transformation Cards

One of the fundamental rules of brainstorming is to build on the ideas of others. Alex Osborn, considered as the originator of classical brainstorming, created a checklist that can help transform existing ideas by prompting users to modify, rearrange, substitute, and magnify. We have built on those core prompts with a suite of equity transformations, asking users to move more to the margin, adjust their discourse, and invert power.

Defining and Solving the Right Problems in the Right Way

Adopting others’ perspectives through a lens of equity requires acknowledgement of the ways privilege and oppression work to include some and exclude others. The following form positions the needs of a person opposite societal obstructions and institutional inhibitors:

A person needs a way to (insert the needs of another) because (insert the values, beliefs, and morals of the person). Surprisingly, (state a fact that demonstrates the intent to meet the need) but (insert an institutional inhibitor or societal obstruction).

Invention with an equity lens requires teams to identify and test the riskiest assumptions about how we understand and know other people. Risky assumptions without an equity lens are racist assumptions. This is especially true when we are designing at the margins. Because our implicit biases frame our assumptions about ourselves and other people, their experiences, and the best ways to solve their problems, awareness of our biases at this stage is necessary to reverse hegemonic invention.

A TECHNICAL TOOL FOR MORAL WORK

As a culture, we currently have limited courage, will, and skill to talk candidly about race and inequity. The current discourse around equity exists in one of two opposing extremes: morality and linear reasoning and logic.

Morality: Driven by our emotions, we talk and evaluate the degree of goodness. We talk about good people and bad people. We learn about microaggressions and reflect on our moral responsibility to be better. This inspires the motivated and engaged to remain critical of relationships, language, and assumed cultural norms, alienating those without the skill or will for engagement.

Linear reasoning and logic: This technical discourse prefers to quantify equity and reduces it to numbers, strategy, and only outcomes. This conversation leaves little room for the real experience of people — the meaning, magic, surprise, and possibility.

Our current equity discourse is either a moral conversation or a technical conversation. It is not often both.

The complex work of achieving equity requires a dialogue bold and sophisticated enough to hold both moral and technical ways of thinking, acting, and designing. This integration requires tools that can marry the head and heart while allowing a diverse set of thinkers — technologists, freedom fighters, and everyone between — to create and design in service of reconciliation.

Equity — the integral sum of inclusive practices that obstruct, threaten, and dismantle systems of oppression and amplify, privilege, and promote the voices of the most marginalized and most affected — is the work of our time. It demands enhancements, retrofits, and retooling of our current toolkits to meet this pressing need. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., work across difference that privileges the voices and perspectives of the most affected “bends the moral arc of universe towards justice.”

We do not have the answers, but we are committed to solving this problem. We do believe that disciplined processes that support the transformation of all of us and our inventions keeps us moving toward realizing the American dream for all people.

Join us to solve it.

If you found this intriguing, stay in touch by joining our mailing lists. Also − feel free to give us some claps to your left and/or leave a comment down below − it helps others find this piece too!

The equityXdesign process is a labor of love created by Caroline Hill from 228 Accelerator, Michelle Molitor from The Equity Lab, & Christine Ortiz from Equity Meets Design.

If you are interested in designing for, accelerating and scaling equity in your schools and organizations, please connect with Caroline at caroline@228accelerator.com.

If you’re doing work at the intersection of equity and design, need additional capacity around equity and design in your program or organization, and/or want to apply equityXdesign to a project, please write to Christine Ortiz, founder of Equity Meets Design, at sayhello@equitymeetsdesign.com.

If you’re interested in working to take on our most intractable race, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI) problems for your organization or sector, accelerating our transition toward a more liberatory, community-centered society that values the gifts and potential of all its members, contact The Equity Lab at https://www.theequitylab.org/contact/.

Wait, one more thing! Equity Meets Design has launched a series of online courses specifically designed to help you build your capacity as an equityXdesigner. That means you can learn how to do this at your pace, in your pajamas! Sign up for (and instantly begin) our free “Intro to equityXdesign” online course here!