
Presenter: Antionette Carroll, Founder, President, and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: Designing With Humility 

Conferences

Brainstorm Design - 2022 Designing With Humility



Presenter: Antionette Carroll, Founder, President, and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab



Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: Designing With Humility


social entrepreneur and equity designer Internet Carroll believes that because inequities were created by design, they can be dismantled by intentional design. The creative reaction lab she founded is focused on building a youth led community centered movement to design racially equitable communities. Empathy has long been viewed as central to community building efforts, reflecting on her own experience with equity centered community design. Internet highlights the importance of humility and redesigning for inclusion. In our next design talk. We will explore how humility as well as vulnerability can help us iterate our way to a more equitable communities and workplaces. Please welcome to the brainstorm design stage Antoinette Carroll, founder president and ceo of Creative reaction lab. What? Hi George. Hi everyone, how are you today? Give me a little bit more. How are you today? All right. So by show of hands, how many people in here believe that empathy is a core component of design, interesting now, also by show of hands, how many people in here believe that designers are experts of empathy. Finally, a truthful room. So today I'm here to talk about how not only do we need empathy and the work that we do, but we also need that one word. We don't use a lot humility. Now, I'm going to challenge your idea of humility because most of the time we think about it through the lens of being humble, but I'm gonna push you a little bit further than that. So most of the spaces I go into, people no matter what industry say that they are the experts on empathy. You can put any creative profession in that space. You can obviously put any profession in that space. And they will say we are deeply empathetic how many people in this room by short hands believe that we all have figured out empathy. Okay. Design observer did an article a few years ago and which it says empathy, you must know by now is a major key word in the design business. We empathize with our clients, we empathize with their employees and their customers. We empathize with outside experts and with humanity. Now I don't know about you but I didn't study empathy in design school. So it's something that I didn't realize was part of the curriculum and there's also something that I haven't really heard people talk about doing accountability lens. Usually I hear people talk about empathy as just a word. But how do we push beyond that? So my company is creative reaction lab I found it in response to the uprising in Ferguson in 2014. Yes, we've had the racial reckoning in 2020 but I will let you know it started before that. And so my company has been around for eight years and in these eight years we have done a lot of work. We have really tried to change people's mindset and have them understand that any system produces what it was designed to produce. We talked about how design is everywhere. And yet I have seen many articles, many comments in which they say well that's not my company. We would never do that. That's not my country. We would never do that because too many times we have not recognized that all of these things have been by design, we like to say it but we again don't hold ourselves accountable to it. So what do I mean by design? We all have our different definitions. I'm a big proponent of language setting. If you don't do language study in your community and your workspaces, I encourage you to do so because we've all had different perspectives in our lives. We've all received a variety of messaging. Believe me I used to work in advertising marketing. We got paid to tell you what to do But the definition I used actually IBM thank you was built off IBM 1960s definition. So they define design at that time as the intent behind an outcome. I have since expanded that and said intention is not enough. We also need to think about design as the intent and impact behind an outcome. How do we hold both in our space? So with that I look at the impacts of our society, I look at the systems of oppression, inequality inequity and I recognize that not only are they by design that also means that they can be redesigned. We don't have to passively navigate life and think that well this is just what it is because people like us have designed these systems, we navigate and also every single one of us in this room actually play a role in this redesign. So creative reaction. Last mission is to educate, train and challenge black and latino excuse to become leaders in designing healthy and racially equitable communities. So in this space I don't actually have to answer the question. What does that mean? Because I get it all the time. What does that look like? But you may also be asking why am I in front of you if I do work with young people? Well once I want to remind you you started off pretty young. I also want to let you know that we actually have a racial bias as early as six months old according to data. So think about the bias is not just racial but all the biases we've had throughout our lives and we have now but also my work isn't just with young people. We actually are building an intergenerational movement of a new type of leader that we call re designers for justice and in that we are changing the way people are addressing systemic oppression. Now this could be at a larger viewpoint of society but this also can be within our works workspaces. This is within our communities. This is also within our homes because some of us you might not want to admit it here avoid certain conversations in our house because we don't want to make someone uncomfortable or we just don't want to deal with it. But all of those moments, our design opportunities and we have to recognize them as such. But I'm going to let you know that being human center, it's not enough because unfortunately many of us look at humanity whether we want to admit it or not, as if we're on a cartoon strip and we're looking at humanity in that one moment of time, we're looking at humanity and that one problem at a time or that one project at a time or that one agenda at a time, that one initiative. We're not looking at everything else that affects people when they show up in the space because I don't know about you, my trauma doesn't go away just because I'm prototyping that shows up with me and so do my biases. So my company pioneered a new form of creative problem solving called Equity center Community design. And in this process we built upon more quote unquote traditional design frameworks, but we actually have pushed us to think about how do we invite diverse co creators? How do we also build our humility to ultimately become empathetic and how do we also recognize the role of history and healing and the role of power dynamics and all the spaces in which we work because throwing some post it notes on a sheet on a sheet of paper and on the table that's not addressing power and that's what we need to be very mindful of. So I'm just going to focus on one if you want to learn more about our process. We have field guides outside for free. You can take them. We also have them on our website for free download. But the one area I want to focus on today is building humility and empathy. So when we talk about building humility and empathy, we are talking about how do we unpack our biases are unseen, areas are power are privileged and the spaces that we navigate in the spaces that we work. Now when I talk about empathy, I am talking about the ability to understand and share the feelings of another and we talked about it as if it's something easy to do. But I've been married almost 18 years and I still find it hard to sharing feelings of my husband. I'm just like something wrong with him. Okay, so if I'm struggling at a personal level and I'm deep in this work, imagine what we are doing is multiple people in the room or as multiple spaces were navigating empathy is not just about the words, it's about the action, but empathy alone is not enough to shift power sustain inclusive and accountable businesses because we all talk about inclusive design today and ultimately it's not enough to redesign systems. We need humility Now, most people when they think about humility, they think about becoming humble now I will name for some communities, I would argue that needs to happen more. But I would also argue in some communities such as being a black woman in the United States of America, I need to actually amplify what I do because too many times I've been erased throughout history. So it's not just about being humble, it's not just about measuring your importance, it's about more than that. So if you are ultimately saying, okay, I am empathetic, but you haven't unpacked your humility, then ultimately it's about you. So empathy without humility means that you remove yourself an equation. You're not actually holding yourself accountable or what role you played in the situation. You think that intention equals impact. I can't tell you how many times I hear, but I have the best intentions. But what about the impact you justify certain things occurring. And we can see that in many spaces whether we talk about police brutality, we talk about xenophobia, we talked about homophobia, all these things that happened, there's usually a justification on why something was Okay. Also, it shows up its judgment, a colleague of mine in the Missouri History Museum because you know, I got represented ST louis who and my midwest folks where y'all at. She says that humility asked us to step outside of ourselves. Listen and absorb someone else's truth. Even if it makes us feel defensive and I would argue, especially if it makes you feel defensive. Okay, you got your shot. Alright. But if empathy has humility, then it's ultimately about us. Whenever they have humility, it requires vulnerability. We always talk about how we need more trust, but we don't take the time to build at the speed of trust. We always have the agenda to build up. The speed of trust means that you have to leave by being vulnerable, but we've been told that we shouldn't do that or it will make us be viewed as less powerful. I'm here to tell you that it's not the case because the important component of that is consistency. If you show up is vulnerable in this one situation and after that, I don't see it anymore, then it was performative and it was about you. Empathy with humility also means discomfort. If you are always centering your comfort, that means you are always excluding other people's comfort. And we usually learn at the margins. It means learning and unlearning together, acknowledging the role we all play in a situation, this scenario and a mission and accountability of sharing and shifting power because we are all responsible for sharing and shifting power. So what does privacy empathy? What humility looks like? I couldn't just say this and then not give you anything because then I'm pretty much being a hypocrite. So what does it look like? It means holding space versus offering advice or critiquing their perspective, not just oh I have an open door policy. Well if I have never felt like I was heard in the space in which we work with everyone else, why would I want to be alone with you? We need to move a little bit more understanding that you can't fully know someone else's experience. You are the living expert of your own life. You cannot pretend to know someone else's. You can't say well if if I was in that situation or if I had that project, I would have done x, y and Z because you've had different experiences than that person and it's not saying that your experiences are better at saying that our experiences are different and that's why we need to co create together is allowing discomfort and processing space and not just saying we want to have safe spaces, but we want to have brave and accountable spaces because it's not enough to just show up with bravery, but then someone be harmed through microaggressions and then we don't hold them accountable for creating that harm and that someone could be you, that someone could be me, we need to hold ourselves accountable as well. It's acknowledging that intent does not equal impact. No matter what they say and no matter how easy it is to say it, it's checking for understanding because again, the way that you understand something may not be the way that they understand something is building in metrics and organizational time for conflict checkpoint. You see me saying organizational time, that means we need to allocate resources and investments around this and if you have caused harm sit in it, sit in that discomfort before you automatically rush to apologize or to fix something, sit in it and think about what can I do differently? So it doesn't continually happen. And then explore your actions internally and with the people that have offered support and make sure you get consent. So I'm going to leave you with this quote to think about in this space today. In the spaces we're all in, we usually hear about diversity equity inclusion a lot. But the whole notion of diversity equity inclusion does not happen simply because there is a policy in place, but it happens because individuals taken upon themselves to lead change both internally within themselves and were in relation to one another as an organization. Thank you rita for that accountability accountability measure. And I am looking forward to us all building our humility together. Thank you. Mhm