Designing for Diversity
Discussed:
- The diverse arguments for diversity
- The stereotypes we inherit as barriers to working together
- Connecting to create vs. creating to connect
- Stereotypes of middle-aged White men and young Thai women
- When you want to ask about someone’s ethnicity and it’s hella awkward
- Would you prefer a world with more knowledge or curiosity?
GF: David, you mentioned that you were interested in getting a a designer’s perspective on diversity, equity and inclusion. I know it’s a topic that a lot of designers are deeply interested in, from the teaching community at the Stanford d.school to Kat Holmes and her groundbreaking work around inclusion in the design of technology. Now in your work, you deal with a tremendous amount of diversity in very different cultural contexts around the world. What kinds of practical challenges are you grappling with related to diversity, equity, and inclusion?
DS: Not just at work, but in many aspects of my life, including my marriage, family, friendships, community and my sense of identity as a citizen of the United States. But I’ll start with my work and maybe we can zoom out from there. I’ve been working at the Hewlett Foundation for just over two years now and during that time we’ve undergone a fairly intense series of conversations and workshops about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” One practical way these concepts have been explained to me is that a) diversity captures how well represented different groups are among your entire staff, b) equity takes into consideration whether minorities are in leadership positions, and c) inclusion represents whether the views of minorities influence decision-making. Unlike most private foundations, we publish the demographics of our staff and board by race, gender and age. (In the future, it would be great if we’d publish those demographics by position — I think it would show that we’ve made a lot of progress on diversity among more senior positions over the past few years.)
I don’t deny the importance of straight-up numbers. You know, like “how many non-white people do you have on your board?” Or, “why is your administrative staff more racially and economically diverse than your program staff?” Those questions are important, but they don’t feel sufficient to me. By just thinking in terms of representation, it could trick us into believing that if we just reach a magical pie graph of perfect diversity, then we’ll have figured it all out. So, it really resonated when I first heard you talk about designing for diversity as designing for a shared sense of belonging. And I’ve been thinking about how it relates to many aspects of my life, including work. The more I’ve thought about it, the more obstacles come to mind that stand in the way of a shared sense of belonging. Is that also true for you at your work, or in the classroom when you teach? Do you have any practical examples of how you’ve designed an experience for a shared sense of belonging, or how you’ve addressed an obstacle that stood in the way?
GF: That’s great that your foundation publishes demographics of your staff and board. I’m going to ask my organization about that — I think it’s something that’s helpful for most (if not all) organizations to do in the interest of transparency and accountability. And I think what you said about publishing demographics by position makes a lot of sense as well, particularly in showing patterns over time.
I think we’re in agreement on the necessary-but-not-sufficient nature of straight-up numbers and representation. (And I do emphasize the “necessary” here.) Like mechanistically managing to numbers of such as quarterly revenue or stock price — or standardized test scores — thinking that representation numbers are the goal could miss the point.
One of the challenges is that there are several — dare I say “diverse” — arguments for diversity. For example, there is a social justice argument. There is an organizational performance argument. And there could be a belonging argument. All of these arguments intersect with each other, and this may sound awesome: “Yay, many good reasons for diversity!” But different drivers may have different points of emphasis and different points of departure. And we can get into this more.
But to answer your questions — it also feels to me that more obstacles come to mind that stand in the way of a shared sense of belonging. With my designer mindset, I don’t find these obstacles discouraging or depressing. Instead, they make me intensely curious! There’s all kinds of things to unpack for myself personally, being a middle-child child of Filipino immigrants, born in Milwaukee, raised in Florida, and public school educated through grad school.
These obstacles come up for me at work, in teaching, and in life in general. One small recent example of trying to design for a shared sense of belonging was in the last class I co-taught at the Stanford d.school, Long Distance Design. (And thanks for being a part of the class, David!) Half of our students were at Stanford, and half of them were in Bangkok. We wanted to create an experience that helped our students get to know each other, and I wanted to level the playing field in one important way: I wanted to eliminate reliance on English in the initial interaction, as it wasn’t the primary language for half of our class. So, we created an exercise where people had to have a conversation with no words.
DS: That class was just four days and yet by the end of it I felt like I had a closer working relationship with my classmates than many of my colleagues at work. The class gave me a much better understanding of two concepts I had heard often from designers: empathy and radical collaboration. The exercises you gave us got me out of my own head to see the world (or at least a certain product) through others’ eyes. So that was the first step, the empathy, which came about mostly through attentive, unstructured interviews. And then there was the radical collaboration — all the time I spent with my teammates discussing the insights that surfaced from the interviews and interrogating the implications for how a product could be better for more people, for different types of people. By the end of those four days, even though I knew relatively little about my teammates, I felt close to them just based on what we had created together.
So that was my first reflection: we can create a shared sense of belonging by working closely with others toward a common goal, even if we know relatively little about their backgrounds and values. My second reflection was that societal norms can still stand in the way of belonging, even when trust is already established. In our team of five, I was the only man, the only White person, and about fifteen years older than most of my teammates. As I listened to the nightly news on the drive home from class there was revelation after revelation of men (mostly White, mostly older) sexually assaulting and harassing women (mostly younger). If my teammates were men instead of women, I’m sure I would have been pro-active in keeping in touch with them after the class. But since they were women, especially younger women, it felt inappropriate to suggest that we should stay in touch. The sense of belonging we created was built atop a foundation of stereotypes attached to our identities. Just think of the stereotypes of older White men and younger Thai women. Sometimes it seems insurmountable to me that we could design for an inclusive sense of equitable belonging when we inherit so much baggage about how and why we interact with one another.
We inherit stereotypes about all our dimensions of our identities, of course, but some of them are easier to talk about than others. I feel much more comfortable talking to you about growing up in Florida or being a middle-child than having immigrant parents or Filipino ancestry. In fact, I don’t even have the vocabulary to comfortably talk about your … ancestry? ethnicity? race? The little I’ve read about “designing for diversity” has been focused on just two dimensions of our identities: gender and physical ability. Kat Ely has an illuminating article that describes how everything from seat belts to office thermostats were designed for men and discriminate against women. It blows my mind that it wasn’t until 2011 that female crash test dummies were required in safety testing! Just like I had never considered the seat belt from a woman’s point of view, I didn’t think about sexual harassment (including in philanthropy) nearly as much as I should have.
GF: When people ask me what I do, I say, “connect to create.” (Those connections can involve disparate ideas, different people, or other stuff.) I’m realizing there’s also a flip to that: “create to connect.” When put in a situation where we have to work closely together to create together, we have an initial context to interact with each other, an initial purpose that propels us forward. We have a reason to connect. We have a shared practice of creating.
Before “communities of practice” got buzzwordy and diluted, Etienne Wenger and others developed really cool things around the concept, including how people develop a sense of belonging around a shared practice with others. One of the useful things about design thinking is that it can help people dive into creating together faster, and help mitigate procrastination/paralysis/inaction routines.
Let’s link that with your second reflection, that societal norms can still stand in the way of belonging, even when trust is already established. Yes, the barriers can feel insurmountable at times. And I’d argue that that feeling of insurmountability, while totally understandable, is one of the biggest dangers. That feeling can stop us from trying. We give up.
But what if we did a flip with this? What if we started not with empathy for others, but instead deeper empathy with ourselves? I’ll illustrate with an example.
You said you feel much more comfortable asking me about growing up in Florida or middle-child-ness than having immigrant parents or Filipino ancestry. Yes, and I also felt very awkward asking you about your ethnicity! Way before you and I met this year, I had followed your work when you were at Global Voices. I had assumed for years that you were hapa, given your last name and your images on the Internet.
After we chatted a couple of times in person, I kept thinking, “I know some hapa people look quite white, but this guy looks reeeeeally white.” And that awkwardness kept lingering until you told me about how your sister explored her mixed identity, which led to your explanation that her biological dad is your stepdad. “Ah, now it makes sense!”
Let’s replay that story, but with a different story arc. What if I had had deeper empathy for myself and had been more self-aware in the moment? My internal dialogue might have looked like this:
“Whoa, David looks even whiter than I thought.”
“Of course, totally cool if he is white, hapa, or whatever… but this is starting to bug me.”
“Why is it bugging me? I’m dying of curiosity while being paralyzed by awkwardness!”
“Hmmm… what could I do to get out of this?”
“I could just ask him if he’s hapa. But I don’t know him that well yet, and that just feels gauche to me in this context.”
“Let’s see… what else could I do?”
“I could be curious about David’s experiences growing up, which could naturally lead the conversation to questions his parents, or his siblings if he has any. That wouldn’t be awkward at all. Yeah!”
This is just one small example of designing an experience — in this case a conversation — that might help lead to a shared sense of belonging. It required some self-empathy and a decent amount of grit, to persist in the effort to work it through, Does that make sense?
DS: Your point about design thinking as a tool to get past analysis paralysis really resonates with me — and I think it’s especially relevant for issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion which I find are analyzed to death without anything being done in the end.
I know I’m not the only person in the world who would like to spend less time analyzing and more time doing. We’ve all been in meetings that amount to endless analysis without ever doing anything about it. In my experience so far, design thinking has insistently forced me to ask myself three questions: 1) Do I have enough information about the problem to test out a solution? 2) What is a simple prototype of a solution I can try out? 3) Did my experience with the prototype deepen my understanding of the problem?
Only now am I beginning to understand the importance of good conversation — indeed, conversational design — as the fundamental skill to gather the information we need to understand a problem and do something about it. And yet we’re not taught how to converse well. We spend at least eight years of formal education learning how to write out an assertive argument, but not a single class on how to have a productive, engaging conversation.
Erik Johnston recently asked me if I’d like the world to have more curiosity or knowledge. ‘Curiosity,’ I replied, and yet our education system focuses more on developing knowledge than curiosity. I’ve been inspired by the work of the Right Question Institute and their work with teachers to help students ask better questions. And I wish “how to converse” were taught at least as often as “how to develop an argument.”
It’s amazing what one simple question can inspire. Last year I was at a workshop on multicultural communication with a bunch of folks I thought I knew fairly well. We were asked to break into small groups and respond to a simple prompt: tell us the story of your name. I was amazed how that deceivingly simple prompt got us to open up about our backgrounds, cultures, families, and personal identities in ways we never had before. I tend to ask direct, concise questions. But I’ve come to appreciate the power of open, indirect questions to create spaces of improvisation and spontaneity. It requires me to pay more attention which takes more energy, but its helped me become a much better conversationalist.
How does all of this relate to designing for a shared sense of belonging? Our discussion has planted an idea in my mind that I hope to pursue. For any organization, community or even extended family, I wonder if three simple questions could help surface ideas that lead to more of a shared sense of belonging:
- Tell me about where you’re from. What do you miss most about that place?
- When do you feel the greatest sense of belonging?
- When do you feel the least sense of belonging? Do you ever feel out of place?
I’m pretty confident that those three questions put to all members of an organization or neighborhood would result in all sorts of useful insights that could lead to more of a shared sense of belonging. I’ve put in a related proposal to a participatory budgeting exercise in my district here in San Francisco, so maybe I’ll even have the opportunity to try it out.
I’ve gotten a lot out of this discussion and I hope others have as well. Do leave us a comment if you have any ideas of resources on designing for diversity and belonging.
