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Fireside Chat: How Design Addresses a World on Fire
Summary
In this Civic Design Community call, we heard from Lesley-Ann Noel, PhD., and Jennifer Strickland, Senior Human Centered Design, Accessibility Engineer. Jennifer and Lesley-Ann chatted about how they approach equitable design through language, frameworks, tools, methods — and self-care. The conversation will cover how Lesley-Ann created The Designer’s Critical Alphabet, and introduce the new book she contributed to,The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression, & Reflection.
Key Insights
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Designers have significant power to influence who is heard and included in design processes, impacting social equity.
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The Designers Critical Alphabet helps designers critically engage with social justice issues, especially in less diverse environments.
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The Good Vibes deck offers positive, Global South-inspired design principles like gratitude and optimism to balance critical work.
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Disrupting traditional power hierarchies in organizations can encourage more open and equal participation in design.
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Positionality tools enable clearer awareness of identities present in a space and highlight systemic homogeneity.
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Framing accessibility and equity in terms of business goals or measurable outcomes can help overcome resistance in conservative workplaces.
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Academia serves as an experimental space for developing and sharing best practices that can influence industry over time.
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Marginalized designers often carry extra emotional and cultural labor not recognized by their workplaces.
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True inclusion means co-creating new narratives and spaces rather than simply inviting marginalized people into existing frameworks.
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Global South design perspectives and international collaboration are crucial to decolonizing dominant Western design narratives.
Notable Quotes
"We as designers have the opportunity to be brave, have the courage and humility to do the work."
"I don’t want to be included in your conversation. I want to co-create new conversation."
"Designers can help facilitate the breakdown of power structures, even if we get pushback from status quo."
"Empathy is a great goal, but sometimes we have to use the stick and provide checklists for what must be done."
"Positionality wheel helps people see who is really in the room and makes it easier to talk about identity."
"People we think are powerless often actually have a lot more power than we expect."
"When you improve accessibility, you increase engagement and success metrics—those are measurable wins."
"It’s exhausting every day doing extra emotional and cultural labor beyond the design work itself."
"Academia pressures us to share research for academic audiences, but public communication is key to impact."
"Critical design thinking tools still have value if we consciously operate within and disrupt hegemonic spaces."
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